The original idle games such as adventure capitalist, cookie clicker, clicker heroes, and even games like a dark room was heavy influence into making my dissertation game the way it is, and yes I wanted it to be unique, but I also wanted to focus on my core to my dissertation being forward progression within idle games.
So if i'm being called a kid, you got the wrong person, as way too much of my time has been looking at idle games flaws and trying to think of new ways on the genre.
Crafting is currently done on the server side to deter hacking, sorry if it feels slugish right now, I will look into it :)