Oh hey, glad you enjoyed it!
Not sure what you mean with the mashers, they should trigger the same defeat scenes as the others. To be clear, before you get the clips, it's just a hard Game Over when you lose. After you get them, you get scenes when defeated. If what you meant when you said you didn't like Bad Ends is that you didn't like hard Game Overs, I actually agree, which is why most of the defeats/scenes just spit you out somewhere rather than Game Over-ing. One of the recurring annoyances with a game like this is that you're playing it to get the scenes, but the scenes dump you into a Game Over, which wastes time and breaks flow. IMHO it works better, and is a lot more fun, if most of them just spit you out somewhere a little worse for wear.
The bartender actually IS directly interactable. The thing to understand about RPGMaker is that it's primarily a keyboard engine with some mouse/touch stuff bolted on. When you click on something, it just tries to translate that to the keyboard commands to move you to the item/NPC and hit the use key. So you can't click the bartender from the other side of the bar because there's no keyboard command that can do that: you can only interact with the counter, technically. If you go around to the other side of the bar however, you'll discover that you can indeed interact with the bartender by clicking on him.
tl;dr: mouse control is a convenience in RPGMaker games, but don't rely on it. They're really meant to be played with keyboard.
Getting rid of the ear clips is a storytelling thing: it helps put a nice bow on the ending. I'd also disagree character-wise: while taking a trophy makes sense, it wouldn't fit here. The implication of the epilogue is that even in victory, Mezz feels a little unnerved/disoriented by the whole thing, and is destroying the clips the same way you'd destroy a cursed item at the end of a horror movie. I woudn't worry too much though: like the board game in Jumanji, we may not have seen the last of the clips.