Cool! Thanks for the comments and playtime. I can definitely appreciate the feeling of it dragging on, and I totally agree that there wasn't a huge incentive to fight the monsters. I sort of ran out of space on the cart and didn't want to spend a bunch of time refactoring, since that wasn't my objective... so certain things (like monster drops and much of a reason for gems at all) kind of fell by the wayside.
I'll definitely look into that save file bug... that sounds like it could be aggravating!