All very good points and lots of those improvements are planned.
- Weapons and combat need a complete overhaul. Whips are really just for herding animals (as they don't hurt them)
- Chickens will be getting some love soon (I like you idea of overcrowding).
- NPC's have name already as well as some 'stats' that are hidden.
- The font is one of the biggest complaints I've seen. They are true 4x4 and 5x5 pixels fonts. The game infact has no up-scaling so I'll have to either scale and refactor every sprite or redraw the fonts bigger.
- In the early game you do click a lot. You get robot helpers though in the current end tech game to basically do all the tasks you do manually. A hold down to chop trees and get water is probably needed though.
- Menus and most of the UI is also in need of work. I am trying to nail down most of the base objects first before I move on to other things.
- The frame rate doesn't drop for me or isn't noticeable. I just noticed it might be because I don't have it set to a fixed frame rate (which it should be, 60 FPS I probably changed it testing stuff out and forgot to switch it back).
- As far as the grid system goes I can set items to any grid spacing I want. Right now I have 16 or 2 for items. I'll play around with some of these spacings maybe something like 8?
I really like your ideas and thank you for sharing them. Know that most of these issues I agree with and there is a plan to fix them. Thanks for the feedback!