You can also get life fragments if the items you collect from going above the POC total 2.0, or if you just straight bomb when there's enough enemies on the screen. Lord knows I did that plenty of times.
As someone who normally plays Easy/Normal, I didn't find DDC Normal to be that hard, like at all. Seija was mind-boggling, sure, but riding that POC was actually the easiest part of the game for me. I think it's a stretch at best to call POC-for-item-collect a "gimmick", but even if we accept that it was, it's not like a totally out there and unprecedented aspect of a shmup to put in there.
Fortunately, there are loads of replays you can look up that'll attest to just how easy the POC thing is, and there's no shame in watching them to learn from them.
The problem is that this is horribly communicated in game. You'll seemingly randomly get these low multiplier things around and there is no indication that the POC is at all related to this. Explaining your gimmick in play goes a HUGE way to understanding it. I just really hated how it was presented and how it interacted with gameplay. Also Seija's still just a textbook example of how to NOT make a boss in Touhou, bland patterns, the most cheap possible gimmick and just more enough it's ugly shots and patterns. Stage 5s should have beauty Seija had... like If you took away the control screw gimmick those patterns would be expected from a Stage 1 Midboss!
And see my only danmaku type games I've ever played is Touhou and more and more I just find the gimmicks really lame. Hell I forgot that Trance really is a gimmick because of how rarely I use it (9/10 times it's just because it's the death drain which gets a 'Oh hey that trance thing is a thing')
But PCB and IN are just as heavy on the risk/reward gameplay as DDC... firstly, you have to PoC to get the extends, since they depend on number of items. Secondly, PCB gives you much more cherry for shooting unfocused, and to get borders at the right time you often have to plan them a long way in advance. IN has you shooting unfocused to gain time orbs, and often not shooting at all to wait for a good cancel.
Really, I like the fact that every game has its own unique gimmick; it's what makes them all different, and ensures that when I'm feeling frustrated with lack of progress in one game, I can have fun playing a different one. And each one tests and encourages me to improve a different aspect of play -- unfocused dodging, PoCing, grazing, timing and placing bombs (in MoF), etc. So I look forward to seeing what TH16 will have to offer 
See just running through PCB and IN I'm getting near the 999 tier at the end of game which tells me I've hit the par level for progression.
PCB's basic stuff with the barrier itself is incredibly good at explaining itself in play. You can figure out get pink boxes and you get this Cherry Barrier that starts big and shrinks down. You'll likely have it pop automatically and get the point bonus. This tells you that it's got a limited lifetime and give bonus points if it runs out. Eventually you'll get hit while it's active and discover the second property of it. Get hit with it up. You live and screen is cleared! The final aspect I'll admit I didn't even known for a long time and that's detonating it like a bomb. That might be found out by panic bombing while it's up. Dunno
With the Time Units thing... does it do ANYTHING? No really I've never had TIME OVER in a run that I didn't use a continue on. Is it a points thing? Because if it's only points (and number of last words Kaguya spams out at the end, which is just bonus points) then it's just utterly ignorable.
I kinda hate the gimmicks he's been pushing lately. It's just been a bunch of bad gimmicks in a row. I shouldn't be punished for not grazing every single bullet like LoLK does (and they're ugly bullets too. Why are LoLK's stages so ugly?)
For me, it was a combination of the songs themselves and the sound font used to make them. TD's sound font isn't as bad as that of DDC or LoLK, but it's not as good as UFO's, which wasn't as good as SA's.
For individual tracks themselves, though, there are a few in each game that are certainly good, but without the Hifuu CDs, Little Princess was literally the only song between the two games I could recall any part of without listening to it, and even that required forcing the OSt on myself a few times while at work. Everything else just...didn't stick. At all. Pristine Beat in particular was a massive disappointment in this regard given how highly it was being touted back in the day.
I imagine this is mostly a product of ZUN's musical tastes changing, so really, all I can reasonably hope for is a sound font that doesn't sound anything like anything after UFO.
(My comment was also generalized to the games on the whole - I love playing TD and feel like DDC and LoLK are outright chores - but that's a discussion for another thread.)
I hear you man. Having to re-record LoLK's stage 1-2 like four times due to recorder and game fuckups (For some reason it kept doing strange things that just lead to the music of stage 1 just dragging on FOREVER while the game went to slide show mode) it was like kill me please. I'm kinda in the same boat as I've tried to make my self listen through stuff like Doremy's theme and it's just... "This doesn't feel like a theme for someone like Doremy". It's a weird feeling about like how there is this weird disconnect in the times I've watched replay against her to look at her cards. I can't figure it out.
