Concluding thoughts: I enjoyed the archipelagation, but I would probably not pick those two games again w/o figuring out a better controller setup. I couldn't input e.g. hadoken / shine spark at all, which was quarrelsome.
Not sure. It might be patched to be a non-issue; the hadoken capsule was patched to show up when you reach it the first time, which threw me off, and Vile (in the intro stage) was patched to instantly shoot the fiht-ending stun balls (rather than having to get down to 2-3 bars of HP first)
Nope! That's part of the secret sauce that lets it work in the first place -- each game h as a graph of "Item X requires Z", and then when the multi-world gets generated, it combines all the dependencies to output a completable run.