Thanks for the follow-up comment!
Yup, I definitely wanted players to be actively engaged while playing.
To be honest though, because of the rules of the contest/judging and all, I definitely threw more stuff at the player and at a much faster pace than I would if this was a full/normal release. I think part of the difficulty you experienced was also because there's just not enough time for you to digest all the systems yet. It's kinda like choosing the lesser of two evils; on one hand I knew doing this would make it tough for players, but I wanted to showcase the potential depth of the system, so we ended up with what you see today.