Hi Freem, many of the points you raised are a result of how poor Flare engine is, let me explain; Slow level gaining (and lvs total count) is a way to offset the overall development difficulty, lesser levels means that the enemies can be reused a lot, the reason is that Flare doesn´t have level scaling for enemies, so I made each enemy by hand. Meaning that if player raised level easier I would have to make way too many enemy definitions files (seriously, boar_lv1, boar_lv2... for every single critter). It´s the very same for items, there is not a random item generator, all items are made one by one, that´s the reason that they repeat so much, since there is not many of them declared. Declaring more while possible would be a waste, since any change in powers(skills), balance, aspect... would make all the definitions useless.
Missing barricades and monsters are a linux only problem due to case sensitivity, it´s working on windows, if Barricade_lv1.txt is called as barricade_lv1.txt ingame Linux will not uset it. Those ones slipped by me.
Now, regarding difficulty it was my fault, I tried for it to be challenging, but as you saw a few things are all over the place, like enemies at map entry points, items stats being too strong, unfinished proof of concept pasives... I had hoped that all of that would be fixed since the only dev said that they would code enemy lv scaling and item generator into the game. Just to say the next day they were not interested in developing the game anymore and will just maintain it from now on.
Now, as someone pointed me, all those issues can be fixed by employing unholy amounts of time to work around them (creating definition files for every enemy lv, declaring tons of items) but I already gave up. Flare is a deficient engine no matter how charming the retro looks are, and I won´t be using my free time on it anymore when basically any other engine has those tools included.
I´m happy you liked it, if you read the first posts I had planned a whole campaign, but had to settle for this. The book fight was meant to be very hard (enemy scaling would help here), sorry you perma-died, you must be kinda hardcore to play like that.