Yeah, categorizing the actions by stance and showing what stance they'll put you in is a big priority - we want for it to be a nice visual map eventually. And that goes hand in hand with showing all the info for an attack - including stamina/balance consumption. Strength is definitely overpowered - basically, none of the other stats have nearly their full potential implemented, and strength is having a larger influence than it should as a result. Connecting attacks is going to have more of an impact now than it currently does - a 0 damage attack is basically a wasted attack right now, and that won't be the case.
There will be other ways to enter defensive stance - in fact, a weaker guarding ability will bring you into defensive as well out of the box.
Good call on the attack still working when you run out of stamina - that'll make "desperation" attacks interesting. Although in normal play you shouldn't really be passing out like that - stamina will have weakening effects as it gets low, but you shouldn't need to exhaust ALL your stamina - that's just the way things are balanced now.
Food is 4 per map slot because you'll be able to use more/less by being more cautious as you explore, among other possible factors on the world map, and I don't want to have fractional food, but that's not set in stone.
Enemy levels, or at least relative strength will be visible if your perception is high enough - I don't plan to re-use encounters the way it currently is, but we may do the traditional palette-swap/adjective/higher level variants that are a staple of the genre, like you suggest.
We do want to have something pushing you forward - food is the first indication of that, and with the aforementioned "careful" movement on the world map, it could create a nice dynamic between risk and reward, but if we see that food can't be made a good enough stick to get people to move on, we'll look at our options. A bogey(woman) that stalks dawdlers could be fun in its own right.
Thanks - this is good stuff. Even for facets we already plan to implement, it's good to know what to prioritize, and anything that's annoying at this stage we should prioritize highly.