Your feedback is absolutely heroic, thank you so much for taking the time to write all of this! Good find with the gear bug and the load game issues, I didn't know about either of those. As for the soft lock with the Oracle, that's really more a "game developer ran out of content so the Oracle always says that" kind of situation :)
You're right on the combat. I did a last minute playtest before submitting, saw it was way too hard, and then scrambled to drop all the monster stats. I never got to play the final version (big fail I know!) and I'm sad about how easy it is. One thing - did you find the spider caves on both the light and dark side? Dark spider is a bit tougher.