No worries, It's basically "red herring - the game" when it comes to progression. I recall that it took me over 6hrs on the first try, did a race against a friend and we both were really experienced with older FPS games.
My guess is that JF probably didn't have interest in the game as it's one of the worst build games in many ways and very unfriendly to beginners.
However it did pioneer a lot of concepts and was very ambitious. Which is why I'd love to do some simple map tweaks and removing some of those red herrings / adding actual sense of progression aside from screaming in joy when you find that blue keycard after going between submaps for hours and killing every NPC in sight.
I mean, the game had NPCs with unique AI personalities, police, kinda interesting gun concepts, non-linear progression where some extra keycard could give you a shortcut to the TekLord's lair later, underwater bases and everything but instead of having actual diving, they simply teleported you underwater and no difference in visuals or physics
Too bad that almost none of those are fully implemented and another 6 months of polish on the game could have made it very different I say.
Are you porting this to a newer build engine version as well? Would be interesting to have slopes to mess around with, this version still has that groudraw.
Also I used to play this without a mouse for a long time (WSAD + arrows) due to the poor mouse code so it's no biggie.