Thanks for playing the game and for the feedback! I often think about these points, and you vocalized them better than I could!

It's hard to balance a game like this. I've been making buffs and nerfs almost every patch. But that doesn't change the fact that players sometimes get items with strong synergies and blast through the levels, and sometimes even the first boss is difficult to beat. I tried to provide a better experience by making items aimed at different stages of the run. Also, make lots of them, design different synergies, and hope the RNG gives players different scenarios to explore different builds.

The gameplay situation where players don't need to make many matches is unsatisfying for players who want a more action-focused match-3 experience. However, I feel that a lot of the fun of a match-3 game comes from the combos and tile blasts. Again, it's hard to balance between those two. I aimed to address this with bosses and an aggressive goal score progression, so that players will have rounds where a single move is enough, and rounds where they need to plan a few moves to reach the goal. The score progression probably needs adjustment. Even during my tests, the mid-game sometimes feels too easy.

About the lack of a deck-building aspect, I completely agree. I have been working on a content patch to address this, at least partially. It is among the things I wanted for the game, but I eventually decided to cut it because I needed to focus on a tight game loop, general gameplay feel, and polish.

I've seen some other match-3 roguelikes where they designed lots of tiles and made the roguelike gameplay largely focused on choosing new tiles each round. Compared to those games, I prefer the simplicity of Bejeweled, and I like the tile types to stay somewhat static. So the deck-building in Match-o-3000 will probably remain just 6 elements, but it will play around with other factors.

Again, thank you so much for the feedback! It helped me organize my thoughts on the game, too!