Thank you for your extremely detailed review!
Easy mode just adds Juha as an extra party member.
I tried to hint that Minerva is the mayor's daughter (both by the two-letter differences in names and by phrases they have in common), which would have been clear by day 5 when she joins your party.
You did understand that by eating ice cream for dinner every night you forwent any stat increases as indicated in the menu on the table next to Minerva, right? That might have left you eating dust by the time the difficulty spiked. Healthy eating is also a moral in this game!
By forgoing the tour (which I should have made more clear), you probably missed the well next to the station as the source of water with which to refill. There should also have been in-battle refills available in the warehouse (she is Kaj's sister as indicated in the tour you missed) for sale, if you had money.
I found it surprisingly difficult for my part to micromanage the difficulty curve. That definitely still needs work.
Kaj's invocation at the corn warehouse simply turns random encounters on and off, and there is no point to having them off until day 6 when an item necessary for progression becomes available.
Spåra's (and Jani's) entrance in person was originally intended as an Autorun event which I could not get to work properly.
I would have loved to have cosmetic changes on the house exteriors to highlight the presence of a fire, but I could not figure out how that is done.
Cabbage rolls with meat and lingonberry sauce helped me out of depression once!