Thanks for the kind words and feedback. Interestingly, lives were added before time(but both were always planned). Lives were added to help guarantee an eventual death. Since I didn't want the game to ever game impossibly hard, time scales with dots number. Thus if some prodigy managed to systematically hit X dots per Y sec, they would never die. One thing that does happen more with dot numbers is messing up. I guess you could avoid that by only doing trios, but that would start to weight on your time. Plus its a way to carry over "state" across levels. Afterall, if you clear one level with 2 second to spare, it has no impact on next level. But with 2 health left, you still have to be careful. You also recover 1 health every round, because I don't like being too punishing.
That‘s actually a good point, probably because I am not (yet) enough skilled in the game, I always eventually failed because of running out of time, so lives seemed a bit pointless. But your probably right, in the long run the lives system could definitely have it‘s benefits to balance and increase the game difficulty the further you get.