Hi! Not the dev, but I was around for a lot of the planning and development process. 

    I think the best way to explain this is that the intent was to make the game feel rewarding by performing well at the stealth component. Even if you don't, you're never explicitly punished for your performance, you just don't achieve the best rewards. This compels the player to interact with the game more instead of putting in minimum effort if they are interested in getting the most out of it. I understand where you come from, because I did help with the testing and even I got frustrated and confused by some of the seeds that I was getting- but that's realistically just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. You learn to be more patient, think more about what the possibilities of your next move could be, and overcome the difficulties- and then you get rewarded with a greater amount of praise from your dragon mistress at the end of it all. 
    I understand this may not be what you wanted to hear, but I also don't think that it's fair to ask a game to not have a driving component for its gameplay. The goal as I understand it was to make a semi-challenging game that keeps the player engaged and rewards them for performance, and I think this did that.

Its in development of course. But you gain combo by picking up treasure. And you lose the combo if you leave the room, or get caught. The combo gives you a slight bonus to treasure collected.