@151
Yeah, it looks possible to get that if you didn't get any archetypes that unlocked magic-adjacent feats. In the future this should be less of an issue because there will be more Feats in all the categories, but right now you have all the BATTLE SPIRIT TRICKS feats and the two common ones.
If you were to make it to level 15 you'd get another selection of Archetypes, and if you got a mystic/arcane/curses one, that'd open up more feats. But this is still a flaw of the current iteration, having to plan around getting an Archetype to make sure you can keep leveling up is dumb.

It makes sense that your limit would be around 7-9, because your weapon, ie your damage, is a level 8 iron dagger. Iron is on par for copper and tin for weapons at a 1x mult for all three physical damage types. Attacking with the quickest attack might not always have the most damage per instant, but it'll also make your attacks more vulnerable to armor since the lower damage will be more likely to get deflected by the armor, which is a fairly complicated process. In theory this makes it fall off harder, and not all weapons are created equal. It'll be good for finishing off enemies and not wasting damage, and also good for applying more negative status effects like bleed, accuracy debuffs, etc, but in a straight damage race, not so great. In that case it'd be important to check to make sure you're selecting attacks with useful wounds- especially bleed and the wound that makes bleed not half every tick, Lacerate. Fast attacks also suffer from bleed themselves more because it will tick, but since your level is higher you should be able to tank this. There is another type of bleed, Internal Trauma, that works a tad differently, but that applies to blunt attacks, of which the dagger has none.

Looking at the weapon metrics under play -> tests -> weapon stat query, daggers have meh to okay damage that fluctuates a lot based on the test, probably caused by the weapon traits. You might want to try the Rapier which is similar in themeing but has a wider range of attacks, including a faster one.
A dex build also might also not impact daggers in the way you'd expect: it increases hit multiplier and dodge multiplier (although your current armor is pretty restrictive so you're only getting a 3% bonus). Daggers do have a low hit chance move that would benefit more, Thrust, but it's not a good move overall and is less common.
They do have ONLY sharp and pierce attacks, which means materials that boost that at the cost of blunt will make them more effective without having an attack that's worthless, and there will be more standard bleed wounds to stack.

In general weapons are probably the most important things to upgrade, you have 5 things that determine your armor but only 1 that determines your damage. In the future you might want to window browse stores to see if they have the weapon type you want, or swap.

That plus your damage penalty, at least partly from your mithril boots, means your damage is probably subpar.
Steel is a pretty good material, as you've seen, closer to mithril than it is to iron, just heavier and unenchantable.

I'm not sure if I explain enchantment modifiers well, but for stat enchantments, numbers under 1 are bad, and numbers over 1 are good- they're both multipliers. Weapons can have non-stat enchantments that add elemental damage, and those are strictly good, adding a percentage of your physical damage as extra elemental damage.

@153
I legitimately have no idea, but Mail armor is less restrictive than Plate, and Sewn/Fabric armor can still be made of Adamantine, which is a very powerful material, if extremely rare. It'll have less stats, but not nearly as low as cloth and the like. Wool also has a higher resistance rating than the other materials, around 2/3rds of iron, once again modified by the style.
You can check the AMP stat difference to see this, it's a multiplier. It works in two steps- first it reduces your dexterity- here you have enough that it doesn't go below 100 and there is still in fact a bonus from that- then it also reduces your dodge directly. If your AMP was better, your dex multiplier (only used for a bonus to hitchance if above 1x) would be higher, up to an 8% bonus instead of a 3%, and your dodge would be higher. Whether this dodge would be remotely comparable to having better armor, I cannot say.
I will note that armor seems to be reducing less damage than I'd expect outside of the full deflections, but I do remember fiddling with the formulas for quite a while to eliminate bad edge cases, so maybe this was the result I decided on.
As it stands you have roughly .79 mobility multiplier, which is equal to the dodge stat. This is contested against the hit roll you see when you're making attacks, and is the result of your dexterity multiplier being positive (the swiftness is also a result of this? I'm a bit unsure with my namings) despite the x.73 reduction to it and your dodge from your armor.

Like many of the niche strategies it'll swing drastically in effectiveness based on your opponent, some weapons have highly accurate attacks mixed in while others have only low-to-average accuracy attacks.

But ultimately, you don't need armor if you can kill them before they can land enough hits to chunk your HP, which is why weapons are so important.

I'm definitely not understanding how this game works a lot of the time. I roll amazing sounding characters and die to the first bear I fight. LOL.
Case in point, I had a character that rolled two mithril items, had an effective dexterity of 89. I chose armor/daredevil for the str/dex... and still failed hard on dodging the bear. So yep. Definitely not getting something.

@156
As camlorn mentioned, you don't start with a super strong advantage, even with two Mithril items, especially if those were armor pieces. The main sense of progression for characters is their equipment, so you're expected to keep looking for better equipment. But doing this usually requires you fighting said enemy using the equipment, or getting enough Aether to buy it in a store.
Enemies are on more equal footing to the player until they start to snowball- the main advantage the player has longterm is the lack of permadeath, making death a minor obstacle not the end of a journey. At the start, they are just the result of 2 NPCs fighting and taking the victor as the player character, which gives them the best of 2 sets of level 1 equipment and level 2 status- usually better than a level 1 dude on average, but worse than most level 2 people. And the difference between a level 1 and level 2 person is only 110% to 120%.
I personally start with the Homa arena to multitask getting better equipment to select from with getting enough xp to level up to level 3. It'd probably be more engaging to do this by going in the Grove instead and fighting people there, but most of my playthroughs are trying to find and fix bugs quickly. If you're willing to faceslam repeatedly into enemies more you can skip Homa entirely and see if you get lucky in one of the nearby town's areas, like Unun's Tower and Tevar's Mine.

As an aside, Dex starts at 100, so effective dex of less than 100 is still being slowed by the armor. But attributes (strength, dexterity, clarity) are supplemental properties outside of dedicated interactions that call on them, such as trapped rooms, skill attacks, and any skills that mention them. They give small bonuses. The daredevil's attacks are also more tactical than offensive, prioritizing bonus effects which often boost your next real attack.

@154
I definitely want to document it as much as possible, but there's a decent chance it'll change when I realize a formula flaw that causes really bad behavior.
Sometimes the game grows past text- such as the text indicating that level 10 would let you beat everything, and other text that has been slowly getting deleted. Outdated text can be more confusing than no text at all.
That said, dexterity and armor resistance are the biggest messes I'm unhappy with, the rest of the stuff I could probably document with a little confidence it'll last, at least in part. Armor has gone through several revisions and been awkward in all of them, since it needs to adapt to leveling more dynamically than a flat reduction or direct percent reduction system would allow.
Many of the systems you don't need super detailed intricate understandings of, but as you've experienced, this isn't always easy to figure out what matters the most and what's a micro optimization. It's even variable, like how a claymore might not super care about wounds if going for first turn kills, but a dagger user is more incentivized to stack wounds on their opponent. Some of these behaviors are emergent and not intentional on my part. I didn't sit down and think 'daggers need to be better at bleeding', it's just a natural result of daggers being thematically fast but weak and how wounds work.
What systems do you think are the least well explained right now that need to be more documented? Especially ones with great mechanical relevance. Think of it as triaging the documentation.

@159
The archetypes should be treated like slots, you can get other ones if you delay or pick feats instead. There's just no indicator of how many slots you have, which is 2 plus 1 every 5 levels.
The way the game handles this is just not offering any if you have this amount or higher. I think there's a bug that I just remembered I made a note to fix and then lost the note, that the level isn't added until after the player's character menu pops up to allow them to level up on the spot, which typically means that above rule is delayed by one level. I noticed this because the debug option to add xp behaved funny.

And, the answer to 'is the game hard, am I a bad player, or is there yet more stuff I don't know?' is the game is poorly explained and overly complex, yeah.
The game is intended to have some factors condense so you can work backward, but then some of the steps are a bit too tangled.
For an example of something that I think works decently, HP multiplier. Any piece of equipment you have could modify that, including your species, but it's added together. You can just look at it and know what it is. Working out how you got that isn't that hard, because you just need to check your enchantments and species.
Dodge is similarly combined, but working out how to get it is an utter mess. It is intended to be itemized, but it's too brief a summary, and the labels aren't explained well, if at all. This is compounded by not fully explaining the relation between dodge roll, hit roll, hit chance, etc, although I'm getting better with standardization if not the actual explanations.

I think, at least, I could make summary screens of what resulted in a stat, and what each stat is used for, ingame. It could extend the stats menu option, I guess?

Potions aren't exactly fixed, it goes in order and some steps have a chance to fail and keep going down the list. But I might be able to include a lookup by what ingredients you have somewhere.

I am curious about the attack timing thing, because that's been in the game long enough that there are a few correct tutorial lines about it.

@161
It was probably the skills granted rather than the Perk itself. It adds Decisive Strike and Vampiric Spirit- strike is granted by the gladiator and hatchet archetypes, while vampiric is granted by Hemovore, which is a bit harder to get.
Any instances of getting a perk, feat, archetype, or skill you already have will do nothing, because having such a thing is a binary state- you either have it, or you don't. For feats (and perks and archetypes) most of them also grant attributes (after camlorn pointed out that most perks didn't and I fixed it), so even if you have all the skills it at least adds something.
That said I'm not sure if this would be displayed for perks- the blurb of obtaining a Perk is part of the tutorial, which doesn't seem to display the perk in full, just tell you it's there so you can check it out yourself. The character menu doesn't tell you you already have skills for the perks and feats you have, because you are guaranteed to have that skill enabled if you have a perk that grants it.
From my sleuthing, the only places where the 'already have' text will pop up are slowstart, which lets you pick any two archetypes to start with, and natural leveling.

What could have happened is that it caused you to level up, and you only had one valid feat available to be offered. I tried testing it in debug mode, but it just gave me the perk silently, in the story tutorial it should also say nothing if you already had the perk from slaying another queen, otherwise it will print "You've slain an ancient evil empress and gained the Queenslayer perk!".

On feeding yourself and your friends to enemies, that was the concept behind what the curse skill did- if you died you could come back and they'd have half hp. But bosses have been immune to that and it ultimately was just plain annoying to remove it when enemies used it back on you.

@163
You raise a good point about the tutorial, and the addition of the Glossary and Manual means the information can be put there for easier reference and kept more segmented.

Weapons and the speed stat are the only always-on modifications to attack time. Each weapon has a set of attacks with different names. For example, Axe's fastest attack is Hack, which is considered 'average time'. Like you mentioned, there is some variability to how long these actions take; like how attacks can roll more or less damage, but the more significant factor here is the attack style, which is similar to target location. The two most extreme modifications here are that Quick attacks take 80% of the normal time and Precise attacks take 130% of the normal time. This system, and the targeting system, are both heavily inspired by dwarf fortress, which does a similar thing except it only grants opportunities and you can still attack any part at any time, leading to the typical strategy being to ignore everything and go for the neck. At one point Trawel listed all the weapon attacks, but a similar reduction occurred so it was tweaked to keep combats more dynamic and interesting.
For the sake of completeness I will mention the fully random adjustment is minus 5 to positive 15 flat addition total, but the player isn't expected to know this, just pick the best of the final results, same with the style.

You can always defend, the main purpose of warmup and cooldown is that actions with a lower warmup and a higher cooldown will do their attack first, which could kill or impair the other opponent before they get to do their attack.

In this case I think these assumptions are formed due to the failure to explain other elements, which encourages players to come up with their own assumptions to fill in the gaps.
Attributes don't have any interaction with time, and cooldowns don't have any interaction with defending. Sometimes there are second order 'technically' effects such as turns passing expiring buffs (such as the dodge roll tactic), but there is no direct relation. There's no tutorial text on it, because it isn't a thing. But the game has kinda set you up to fail here, because so many other things aren't documented.
I can't document every lack of a mechanic, but if I comprehensively list everything attributes can do, there will be less guesses and then less wrong guesses.

On alchemy, it's less best and more it goes sequentially. Admittedly the main place where this matters is for stews- there's a list of "priority potions" which are checked first, then the game might decide there's too much food and it takes over your potion. The other order isn't intended to be by best, but that doesn't really matter since it's fully deterministic outside the cursed potion failure chance.
The main instance where this would come up is that apples add uses to all potions, not just ones where they're ingredients; letting them be used as filler like wood with a lower chance of failure.
This also leaves room where potentially over-saturating one ingredient could result in a different kind of result, although that would be unintuitive so is best left out.

@165
I was thinking of setting up a github wiki, but I'm not sure if the ability to update it without redistributing the game would be a plus or a minus, since it wouldn't be for the exact version of the game people have, but there'd be less overhead to shipping it and fixing errors.
I'd actually be fine with writing HTML directly I think, but there'd probably not be much benefit to doing so instead of using a converter.

I guess a few pages that have a list of terms and every mechanic they relate to in order of importance might go a long way? It'd be information overload but if it's sorted by relevance that might make it easier to parse, and it being searchable is a major boon.
That would also render it more resilient to small tweaks.

Getting this error (on Pastebin) consistently after I fight the level 16 fighter at the inn.

@169
I still think this is just 3 or 4 shell commands.  I haven't looked; maybe I will; I still also think you could just have one distribution avenue and that's what I'd do.

I'm not so concerned about information overload.  You're going to lose everyone who would care about that at incompatible saves.  My crystal ball says incompatible saves is what's going to "finish" this project for you in that special way software has of reaching a state where all the things you could do are too much effort to be feasible.

GH wikis work for us but you won't benefit from anyone but you editing it. GH wiki for guides would be better than the steam thing specifically as regards blind people but--again with the incompatible saves gate--I think the difference between those two is very small for the people who will play for any length of time, just because you can expect high user aptitude.