1. Oh, this is helpful! I haven't been able to find anything on the level 2 attack, just 1 and 3. I'll get right on that.
2. They might be recovering every frame, instead of every animation + sound cycle, and they might be recovering way too much. What I know is that some (slime and jellyfish) are meant to spit out their capture after dropping below half health, which I don't remember whether I properly implemented. They DO take half damage from attacks while capturing, I did implement that though. I'll double check video evidence and compare notes again.
3. I originally had it exactly like this (press the button X times in Y seconds to escape) then I carefully read the user manual which said something about a gacha-type system for escape (which sounded like spend X health for a Y% chance to escape). I think both have their merits, and I could definitely add it to the list of things to include in an options menu once I know how that should look like.
4. See, I knew SOMETHING was going on with the inconsistent, infrequent item drops. I did a whole statistical analysis across multiple videos, tracking which rooms exhibited which enemies of which types dropping what at which frequencies. I believe I settled on a per-enemy sorta.... "juiciness" metric, which determines which item pool to select from. Enemies are either "regular" (25% chance to drop rice, 12.5% chance to drop meat), "ricey" (50% chance to drop rice), "meaty" (50% chance to drop meat), or "upgradey" (25% chance for rice, 12.5% chance to drop meat, ~3.9% to drop a pow-up, ~3.9% to drop a health-up [3/4 × 5/6 × 1/16). If you had more concrete stats, or could tell me otherwise why the slimes at the end of level 1-2 seemed to drop a meat when that's outside the expected range, or why the spawned slimes from le pipes ALWAYS dropped ONLY rice, that'd be awesome and amazing, stats are really tough to glean from limited video evidence.
And thank you for being so thorough with your feedback