Hi, thanks for playing! I completely agree that 1 giant puzzle doesn't allow for a paced experience with small dopamine hits along the way, but as you said, from the narrative's perspective, it made the most sense, and as you can probably guess, the game started its development from the narrative component.
I also am sad to hear you found issues with the collision system, I agree it didn't perform the best. It's most likely to do with the range. I had to cap the hover range because if you picked up an item from too far away, the velocity it would accelerate towards you caused some problems and I didn't have time to fix that so that was the next best thing. It seems it was at the cost of the user experience.
What do you mean by sockets moving away?
I agree that the hover should have shown through the hedges, it was next on the todo list (also one of the most requested features). I agree it's missing background ambiance and music, I actually made a build with way more sounds in but I missed the deadline by a few minutes!
Don't worry about sounding negative, all feedback is useful, I completely agree with what you've said. Do you have any other feedback? By the way this has been very useful to me, I'd love to receiving more feedback similar to this in the future.