I really appreciate this detailed feedback! These game jams have been so, so valuable as learning opportunities.
I've started a utility library of reusable QoL features, and audio settings are a high priority. I learned its importance when playing an incremental game where I wanted to still hear SFX but turn off / adjust the music volume. Given the simple UI of this game, I'm considering that maybe a master volume slider could go into a collapsible control in the corner, and maybe individual audio bus volume available behind a pause menu.
Your praise for the cutscenes means a lot! Thank you. It was not my original plan for the game, but as I built the cutscene system, I discovered a pattern that gave me a LOT of control over scripted events, with highly expressive, concise, maintainable code. I think I might focus on cutscenes for a while, maybe release a plugin if it can be generalized enough. If you've seen Godot State Charts, that's a model I have in mind, where, yes, you could write your own state machine system, but it provides an opinionated but flexible way to get you working on your game and not writing boilerplate.
Admittedly, I'm not big on VN's myself, but it seems like this game been well-received by others with similar reservations about VN's. I featured a couple of my favorite things in video games: environmental scale and motion, which is maybe absent from VN's in general.
There are some genre conventions that I should implement, that would start to address your QoL wishlist, like pausing, saving progress, return to title, etc. I should roll this into the utility library.
Interactivity is an interesting design question. In my research into VN's, there doesn't seem to be a clear consensus, which is not to say that a game should try to be everything to everyone. Right now I'm considering the idea of optional interactivity, maybe sometimes just fun graphical "toys" in a scene. An example might be, drawing inspiriation from a game like Okami, when you click/touch the night sky it draws a shooting star.
Thank you again for the constructive feedback!