What an awesome project. I would love to mess with random stuff like whirlpool strength and see what it does to the game. Efforts like this to make the decompiler output intelligible e.g. meaningful variable names make this much more approachable for a technical person like me without much of the niche platform-specific reverse engineering skills. In fact there are countless games I'd love to dive into like this.
Train a ML system on a range of parameters (whirlpool strength) until you have a decent port of the game to a neural network and/or tree-based algo. Then try to optimize the game based on people’s enjoyment.
