Yeah, the game has a lot of issues.
In case anyone reading this hasn't played the game, SPOILERS ABOUND
The village does have a very small population shown in-game. This was because I didn't have time to make separate assets for everyone. in the beginning, I was also a humbling of adding walking animations for everybody. Due to the the amount of work that'd entail, I decided to keep a small number of characters.
Regarding the travelers, I probably should've made it clear that they probably came from their own village. Most likely that village also lost their core somehow and sent out teams to steal the cores. I like to think that at the beginning, only a few villages were affected by the core corruption. But then those villages tried to steal and created newer victims. It's more of a chain than a circle but you get the point.
In the cycle ending you most likely keep on fighting more and more villages. That's why so many die. I should've made it more clear that they were not just fighting the travelers.
The reason why the travelers could handle being separate individuals was because they had a mission. As long as their goal is the same, they don't need to read each others minds. If they didn't, they'd be arguing everyday like they did in the room scene.
The fact that this village survived in ending B seems like a miracle, because that's what it is. Most villages would probably choose to steal a core instead of giving up entirely.
The reason the priestess assumes that stopping them wouldn't help is probably due to a but instinct. She felt that the travelers were not that different from them and that they could also end up like them (which does happen in ending A). She probably understood that they were not just the only ones hunting for cores and decided to give up.
Regarding the technical issues, most of it stems from not using unity previously for cut-scenes like this. In the first version, I actually did snap the the characters to their positions when you hit skip. It looked unnatural so I cut it out. But, I didn't realize that it'd cause problems like the one you mentioned. I probably should have some toggle button for the auto text advance. It'd actually be pretty easy to implement.
Thank you for being honest. I know that a lot of my explanations are probably my head-cannon. Some of the hints were in the game but I think I did a poor job of explaining things in-game.