Hey! Thank you for the great in-depth review! We're glad you enjoyed your time with it even despite the more unintuitive aspects :)
With the disclaimer that this is an explanation and not an excuse, a lot of the issues you cited come down to cut content we ran out of time before we could implement. For the ledge grab, you can toggle it on/off, and you only need to hold shift when it's toggled off, otherwise t behaves as if shift is always being held automatically.
Esc closing instantly was a holdover from the debugging stage, I will have to add a confirmation window for that definitely.
I planned on being able to toggle between QE strafe and AD strafe but I'll be honest, I just plain forgot I was goin to do that by the time I got to the control schemes. That one is my bad, haha.
The game essentially autosaves your position every minute, which is how the reload works! It's mostly there in case there's a game breaking crash so that players don't have to start over. Glad it was useful :)
Thank you again for the amazing review and the opportunity to watch you play it! It's always a great resource for learning to see others go through your game.