Glad you over all enjoyed the game, I can give you the rationale behind some of those decisions. Generally people seem to like our arrows, with them we've tried to strike a middle ground between having to click on absolutely everything and havng it obvious where things are hidden e.g. with a little sparkle. We've tried to use it to encourage exploration in our game as you can't see where the extra teasures are unless you explore but again we didn't want players to have to click on everything.
One of our influences in ideas was Bravely Default. I think everyone who makes rpg maker games knows how annoying random battles can be at times and we liked that in Bravely Default you could mess with that and adjust it to your liking. Our implementation is a little basic but it's one of those things we'd like to built on in future to allow players to play our games how they would like.
Usually puzzles are something I do if I have time when everything else is done (which means almost never), I think the real issue with the driftwood map is that when you travel the currents those count towards your next random battle which ended up dragging the map out quite a bit and makes travelling around quite a bit more time consuming than intended.
I'm glad someone thinks the game was balanced well, I am off the opinion you can never win on game balance, it is simply too subjective to individuals and coupled with early optional content means it's very easy to get ahead of the difficulty curve, but at the same time you don't want massive difficulty spikes when players don't do the optinal content. The first group of enemies are designed to teach you the characters strengths and weaknesses which clearly they did, but at the same time the beach was a lot longer than I expected so you ended up fighting against the early enemies for longer, when we go through the game again I'll probably introduce a third set of beach enemies and bump up the second set to be introduced earlier.
As for making more games I think that's assured we've been working together now for five years and we're still having fun. Thank you again for your playing our game and leaving us feedback.