Going to reply to this one, as following all your threads to their end point is like unravelling string ;)
1. The small portraits are on purpose. They're used to either prevent the paperdoll from obscuring the background or to indicate that the speaker is further away/moving away from MC.
2. The Ami thing should be mostly fixed in the latest version, but there's one or two places I still need to tidy up. It's legacy code that I forgot to remove when I implemented some new systems.
3. The recipe thing was fixed, then I made a small change and that broke it again :P Fixed for the next version now, I pinky-promise!