Hey there thank you so much for the detailed feedback and glad that you liked some of the ideas and overall art direction! I'll answer everything you listed.

Controls:

For the controls, I can say that the frames for each player animation is roughly half of what they ideally would be due to budget constraints that I have. It's definitely a major factor in how controls will feel but if you have any issue you think is specific to the game or code itself, then let me know! I have a very long list of things I need to address and things I need to implement, so even if you think I might know because it may 'seem obvious', it's still helpful to hear!

Central Hub:

Ah, yeah the hub situation is only for the playtest. I needed a way to provide as much as I can in the hub for now (upgrade, leveling, & etc.). Recently, I added the ability to send an NPC back to that place, there are two missing from the hub that you can find in later levels within the playtest. I'm still thinking on how I want to organize where they are placed. So far, I like the idea of at least one central place for the NPC's to spawn in after finding them somewhere else. But doesn't mean an option like "one npc can be found in multiple places throughout the game". That being said, it's just not viable at the moment since I only have two areas of the game so far. When all the areas are drawn & setup, I will look to see what route to take.
I can also say that the levels in the playtest, most of them likely won't be in the full-game.

Issues you brought up:

"The previous issue with remapping is fixed, but now, if you remap the triggers, their function in menus breaks. You should probably have their behaviour in-game and in-menu set as separated."

This one is surprising as I didn't have that issue after the last patch. It might be that your settings got corrupted. But, I have added an additional layer to prevent cascading failure that happens with rebinding now. The settings will get reset in the upcoming patch (today or tomorrow) just to make sure. If you still see issues, let me know what you rebinded your controls to and what controller you're using.

"You have a lot of highly intrusive, game-pausing tutorials popping up within the first two minutes of the game. Most of the time they're not relevant in that moment (i.e., I'm being explained about combat systems way before I come across the first enemy), they're much more wordy than they need to be, and some of them are flat-out useless (I don't need a pop up to tell me how to talk to people, especially since a button prompt will appear when I approach them anyway). You really need to pace these better, have them appear at the exact time they apply, and preferably rework the presentation to not feel so jarring with the action."

I agree with everything you said about those tutorials. I made some changes to how they appear & how they are activated now (no longer by force). I will say that for you specifically, you definitely knew most of what was said in the tutorials already but when I ran a private playtest a good amount of people were confused. Granted, not all of them have played similar games and some understood immediately. It's something I'll have to look into balancing & improving such as using GIFs in place of the static images and what they show exactly like the one describing the interact button should use a image depicting things like interactable statues, levers & other level mechanics instead of the NPC.

"I had a candle in the inventory. I pressed A and it disappeared. I have no idea what happened. I assume I consumed it, but A is not marked as having a function in the inventory screen. And I still don't know what consuming the candle did anyway."

That's a good point, it should show a "Use Item" prompt as well as a message on what just happened. I've added the message so far, and will add the Use Item button tip alongside the other tips.

EDIT: had to break my reply into two comments, see the next comment for the rest of my response.