You do you dev-man, i just hope you dont get bogged down in endless cycle of reworks. You know what they say "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush".
Since you are doing a rework can i suggest a few things?
-More in story explanation how evil protag got his troops loyalty so quickly? I mean its fine if they follow their generals/leaders but some dialogue indicates that they are mind controlled in some way? Maybe i missed something.
-Second suggestion is also a recommendation, there is a similar game with mind control/corruption theme being developed in SRPG by some asian dev and it has a interesting feature of "character guide". A description of post and pre corruption characters, could be an interesting feature that also could help players who miss characters lore, here is a link to the game and screenshot of the thing.
-Its a shame that Bosun and Jetho are getting cut, i really hoped for some Bosun changing into Loki-like character (from Venus Blood: Frontier, pretty good corruption game), that is a scheming tactical genius going "all according to keikaku" but also being a able, likable protagonist etc... And i kinda hoped for Jetho-tf sequence if you catch my drift.
-After playing more i understand the combat better but winning requires some underhanded tricks, like kitting enemies to you. Wish the leveling up was less RNG dependent and was less obtuse. Weapon endurance is still meh feature in my eyes but i understand why its here (limiting chapter specific weapons). Maybe lower the cost of repair item?
-Since you said that you "grew a bit dissatisfied with certain parts of the game like corruption scenes", maybe you could separate those corruption scenes into "tier 1" and "tier 2" characters where tier 1 gets full event like it is now and tier 2 gets only a few slides to avoid forcing yourself to write a lot of dialogue? There is a lot of characters already and i understand that writing full dialogue for them can be tiring.
-About balance, im not sure if less enemies are necessary, i would prefer seeing less enemies that can one shot your heroes instead.
Ok and last thing since this is getting unnecessarily long now.
I really appreciate your gameplay design, SRPG might be simplistic as a turn based strategy game but even with that some missions shine as a tactical puzzles, like in mission "Defense in Depth" i literally barely made it, dealing a killing blow to the boss on turn 18 as the map was getting swarmed with enemy reinforcements. Really good and memorable moment achieved trough good design.