I definitely agree there's a design issue there. Picking up the springs can be infuriating. We tried to tackle that by trying different approaches, e.g., making the cat unable to use springs if it's not carrying one. But everything felt weird.
I think the best approach would have been to make the cat ignore spring collisions while "crawling" using [S/Down Arrow], but we didn't have time to implement it.
Thanks for playing our game!