[2022] As someone who likes to play a round or two when having some minutes to spare: I spent the majority of my time waiting for a possibility to join a match

We discussed this in feedback. We can't do this because of the way the code is set up - the game cannot dynamically scale due to people who enter or exit. Phase 1 only needs to know the scaling when the abyssal creatures come out. We have a theoretical solution that could enable this, but it would be a substantial rewrite of a core system of the game which would take up a lot of dev time (a sprint's worth of work, which is like 2 weeks). In the meantime, we're looking into making the HUD visible in the lobby but it won't address the core issue you've highlighted.