Thank you so much for playing the game and finding the time to provide such detailed feedback. I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to provide such thoughtful insights on my game. I am not sure about the initial load issue, I have heard similar feedback on other games but I could never reproduce it. I will try to get some friends/family to try on their computers to track the bug down. I do agree that the controls could be better - I will try to prototype a lot of different options and get it playtested with some other people to see what gets me the most positive feedback. Finally, thanks for noticing the difficulty curve, I have had some players complain that the difficulty was too hard and I artificially rate limited the AI, but I may have gone too extreme in the other end. I will try to ramp up the difficulty and maybe not penalize defeat as much.
It is really hard to get good constructive feedback as friends and family usually always say good things or nitpick about small things - so thank you again for the detailed constructive feedback.