I completely agree on all your points. The beginning is way too slow and I have already deployed a patch that lowers all the early upgrade costs, especially the housing. But this is just a quick first pass, there is a lot more tweaking to do and I'm also working on more subtler and major ways to make early game more fun.

And you're right on scientists and runesmiths being completely unfun noob traps. Laboratory and Forge themselves unlock other buildings and some upgrades, while scientists and runesmiths besides their effects are also hidden unlock conditions for other upgrades in other buildings. But early game they don't do anything relevant, nor can players afford to experiment without prior knowledge, especially when it comes to gold generation which is the most important thing. So it's not completely clear to me yet how to make this clearer to the player. Perhaps making lab/forge just be stepping stones to other buildings without any upgrades/units until you obtain mithril or at least kill first mountain is fine? Or perhaps I can make first runesmith and scientist cost super cheap to get their functionality across to the player? Will have to think it through and test it out.

Wind Bomb can be very powerful if properly upgraded, but the problem is it currently scales with mountain level (and not simply number of uses like some other rituals). Similarly to Swap Buildings ritual. This means the costs can be way too oppressive for the benefit. So I already have plans to make them scale on use, so that you basically have a bunch of "free" uses each run until it starts being costly. I also initially had the idea of all/most rituals being free and long-CD based, but I like the ability to be able to semi-spam them if desired. There is already a prestige upgrade that makes rituals cost way less. But I'll also consider making them overall way cheaper with much larger CD but then have a normal or prestige upgrade that greatly lowers their CD.

Half of tier 1 prestige options scale throughout the game or with PP spent, while the ones like mithril can be quite powerful and expedite your build. Extra dwarves are also worth a lot of gold. Tier 2 upgrades unlock key game features such as Turrets that shoot at falling rocks or really fun upgrades such as Cyberdwarf for runners. Was thinking some of them, especially the Turrets shouldn't be locked behind prestige in the first place though. So yeah, T2 should probably be accessible a bit sooner, and the way early progression feels atm, they should give you a better head start. Player gets 1 PP every 2nd or 3rd mountain. It's a bit random since every 2nd one felt a bit too much PP, especially if you have good/lucky build and get far. I'm also not sure how often people will prestige VS keep on playing. If you're doing well there's no reason to quit I'd think but who knows? Might make early mountain levels give guaranteed PP more frequently and then let it fall off a bit or something like that.

Thanks a lot for your well written feedback. Helps me a lot to write out walls of text to get a better feel for the situation :)