This is a poster child for constructive criticism!
Great thoughts and incredibly thorough explanation! Thanks for playing the game. I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I will have to check out Gyrus. I've never played it.
Seriously thank you for the feedback. I personally liked the screen shake with low health, but I definitely see what you mean about making tracking more difficult, so I dialed it back quite a bit so it's hopefully not so distracting.
Also, I adopted (closely) your status bar recommendation and it actually opened up a lot of space to fix some things and add some features!
I hope you enjoy the changes. I also hope you don't mind my adding you to the credits under my list of play testers!