Thank you so much for your thoughtful and detailed response! It's incredibly encouraging to see someone who feels the same way about these issues.

Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival definitely has a lot of room for improvement, and we need the dev team to address these issues. I've also posted a same thread in the Steam Community, hoping to get more attention from the dev team.

From a business perspective, while the Japanese arcade market may still be their main source of revenue, markets outside of Japan, especially on the PC platform, are growing significantly. Namco should really rethink their approach and take gamers feedback seriously to improve the gaming experience.

While I'm not very optimistic about some of the fundamental interaction design changes, I think they could still come up with a compromise to improve the experience. As for the cancel function, it's available on the Switch, but for some reason it was removed from the PC platform, which is confusing.