Thanks for your very thorough review! No worries about the wall of text, it's a good thing. :)
I agree with you that pressing space so often gets annoying, if I could change it I would indeed include some kind of auto-skip option.
Your suggestion to add a progress indicator is a good one. At one point in development we were going to include a gold-counter that ticks up when the hero loots rooms and enemies. The gold would basically serve as 'points'; a way to measure how well you did after each run. I think we removed the gold counter because of time constraints.
Right now the game is not endless, there is indeed progression and a genuine end to the game. If we were to make this into a full game, I think it would work well as a rogue-like, with endless procedurally generated rooms and levels.
Automatically moving items to/from the combine area is the kind of quality of life improvement that I personally value very highly, it is purely for lack of time that we didn't implement it. I would have probably made it work by shift-clicking the item or something.