Thank you so much for taking the time to write such thoughtful feedback. To address a bit of what you said:
-Creating bushes side to side is really hard right now because we were too immersed in other parts of the game (like bugs and collision-based softlocks) and left that unfinished. However, if the game is updated that will be the first thing we'll fix: make horizontal growing easier.
-Growing a tower of bushes is certainly a game plan too good for a big part of the game, while testing it we also noticed it and tried to fix it making more level layouts (ones where it wasn't so easy to come from one column and pass the section), however it clearly wasn't enough and fixing it will be hard.
-Finally the gameplay loop of the game is a bit lacking because we were fixated on the idea of making the game an arcade experience (maybe we messed that up a bit by not putting incentives or milestones for achieving certain heights) for the Jam, the idea of a lineal-level based game was in the pool of ideas at first but was thrown out early because we didn't know at the time how was the game that we had, now that we've played it, maybe we'll consider making it linear, or at least more lineal.
Again, thanks so much for the constructive feedback, means a lot for the team.