I've played hardtype 5 times now and i've also gotten about 10 or so other people to play it (and more are planning to soon), and for some, it was their first experience with an smt game. Feedback on that front is that as long as they have the modified heretic mansion even newcomers seem to love the hack! Right now some of my friends and I are working on making a demon tier list (tier is decided on how good a demon is for the period of the game it is relevant during and how useful it is in general- including for things like fusion)
On the topic of feedback, I am of the personal opinion that death and expel skills could use a bit of a revamp.
My first issue with them is that just like vanilla nocturne you are running into instant kill skills right from the start of the game, but with no reliable way to keep them from instant killing the MC leading to some pretty BS feeling game overs.
If you could add some death/expel skills that were of the more standard damaging variety and moved the instant kills back a bit I feel like it could go a long way towards the game feeling fairer and adding a bit more depth to the encounters.
Another thing I was curious about is if you would be willing to share any documentation or tools you use for hacking nocturne? I'd love to play around with it! Adding some more evolution demons and making the worst ones a little bit better would be a fun little project!
Sorry, I rambled for so long, I just really love this project!