I think it was intentional, but I'm not sure. The Scrapbot is supposed to be the first enemy you encounter (as seen in the cutscene), and it's supposed to be a tutorial. I'm assuming that somewhere in the code, our tutorial boolean wasn't turned off after the cutscene is done.
For the Spider Droid, that, I'm not entirely sure about that one either. I think it's just supposed to make the game harder, you only dodge completely when you hit the perfect middle, and take only 1 damage instead of more when you hit the sides of the middle. If you're talking about the attacking, it's probably as an incentive to actually hit the middle.
Of course, in the future, we plan to overhaul the entire battle system and change it into a deck-building card system that takes our own friendship mechanic into account, but that's pretty far in the future when we develop our skills more.
Thanks for your input though! I hope I explained everything as best as I can. We'll be changing all of that whenever we bring the project out of the shelf, since we're pretty gassed right now.