Great points. Specific ones to call out:
1.) Surfaces shouldn't be that easy to create.
THIS. Even cantrips create surfaces. That's their D:OS mindset. This is D&D and surfaces should be much less frequent. Sure, your fireball can set highly flammable stuff alight (e.g. wooden desks) but it shouldn't make a stone floor catch fire. The surfaces are so common that they're annoying and actually make me hesitate to use spells.
17) Magic that influences communications should be usable in-dialogue.
Agreed. A lot of scrolls are kind of useless in that you can't always predict when a cutscene will trigger with NPCs, when you would have wanted to use one of those scrolls or spells. Having a little button in the bottom left that allows you to cast it at the start of dialogue would be good, even though not the way you'd due it in PNP. Its a limitation of the CRPG format so it doesn't bother me if you had to implement a feature like this to circumvent it.
But agree with all your other points too.
