I don't usually post on forums about our game, but I figured since I'm already on this site I'd make an account for my alternate identity and hit a few points.
The popup menu is up to the right of the text box. It includes the autoplay option.
The controls screen was added because there were so many people doing YouTube let's-plays that couldn't figure out how to work the basic features. We've got a lot of players who've never touched a visual novel before so we had to figure out a quick solution to help them out.
Like the demo says, music is very much a placeholder. People were so antsy to get a demo that we decided not to wait for the full score. Same goes with some of the art. Tom especially will have more sprites later.
The names weren't a rush job. We've always had some in the back of our minds, but when you go from names that everyone knows, not everyone's gonna like them.
Saving should have been fixed in this version of the demo. Was there a particular place you tried to save that crashed it? Perhaps PM me the crash log?