Glad you found some good stuff in it :) And yeah, it's definitely not one for everyone.
Finding the Mayor was also a slight problem for my game testers so I shifted around the dialogue a bit to try and fix that; but I guess it wasn't quite enough!
I certainly agree with you about trading the key... I had hoped to have come up with some way of displaying this compellingly but couldn't find one that wouldn't interrupt the aesthetic. Perhaps, as per a comment below, a simple "GIVE" prompt would have sufficed.
Thanks for playing and for your helpful feedback!