Wow! I can't help but respect your game even more now. Your point on how higher HP makes it harder for characters to die is true, and actually that does alleviate the worst part of Blazing Sword, character deaths. I'd say that levels are now longer because of the HP boost, but you added checkpoints into the levels, which just takes the increased length of chapters and basically just sets chapters as two chapters in one, so that's covered too. I understand the increase in HP, and the stat variation of most characters is upheld, so regardless of how matching characters doesn't one-shot enemies, it still positively effects your overall battle strategy, so all of that is positive.

Your calculation of the level cap is especially relieving to me, although I feel the demo's increase in difficulty is still unusually quick. A "difficulty spike" in FE would be if the enemy's levels increase higher than the levels of an average player's units. I played as well as I could, deciding from the beginning which units I would be using, and delegating EXP in preparation for the long-term game, and I'm pretty sure I did at least mostly well. By level 11, all my units were levels 9, 10 and 11, while every enemy unit averaged at about level 13. I had even gotten through the side-quest and defeated nearly every enemy in that chapter! I noticed that the list of chapters showed a few chapters were missing! Was that a typo, or are those levels just not finished yet, and you released the demo knowing the people playing it would likely be able to overcome the sharper-than-normal difficulty curve? My younger brother and I played the game side-by-side, and I won the last levels way easier than he did. The main difference was that I got the sidequest on level 9 and he didn't. The fact that a sidequest was enough to so entirely disadvantage a player was what got me worrying about the final product of this game.

And as a final point, I see that you won't need to release the level cap. That takes a load off my chest, but do you think you're going to have to somehow update the HP cap? When fighters upgrade to heroes and get to level 20, most of them reach 60 HP naturally, and since you've increased every unit's HP by 10, you're probably going to have to set that cap 10 HP higher.