"Crush" as in all these obstacles can be reliably overcome, yes, with sufficient experience--as I believe it should be in a roguelike.
And yes, combat is perfectly viable. I stream Cogmind on Twitch, I only use combat builds, and I often win (or at least get to the end--in fact, I've never not reached the late game). It usually takes about four hours. Some of the wins on the leaderboards are combat-heavy tactics, but there are lots of players who enjoy other sorts of strategies as well.
Regardless of strategy though, you have to play very differently than you would other roguelikes, otherwise you're going to die. Repeatedly. Forever. One day permanently even!
i don't mind the dieing, that's part of the fun of roguelikes. what grinds my gears is getting stuck or overwhelmed and stuck "as in not being able to fight back". take my first post here for instance. getting stuck after a collapsed ceiling. i believe space rangers had a way to rescue you like if you waited long enough after running out of fuel some ship would fly by and either share some fuel or loot you. cogmind's enemies could perhaps come after you and dig through to kill you especially since after you wait long enough messages keep showing up that say troops are being dispatched to your location. but they never show up, never find you if you are surrounded by walls. or a game over message could appear telling you, you died miserably to rust / lived forever thinking about how you let yourself get trapped like that.
then there's another way to get "stuck": it's very frustrating to have weapons in your inventory you can't equip because you've ran out of matter. and matter is not that easy to find if you can't kill anything because you have no equipped weapons. so maybe a kind of self sacrifice like an inbuilt option to melt something else that is equipped to get some matter, even parts of the core. heat will dissipate, energy get's restored if you disable stuff and wait a few turns, matter gets you stuck. and it's easy to think/hope one more shot will suffice to kill that last enemy and ignore the low matter warning or just be a little low and equip another weapon which gets blown off right away. even running away will only piss you off more if you find weapons but no matter. i believe even if you make it to the exit you won't get your matter bar filled.
btw i am getting better at building solid fighters and this is the first roguelike i play with ASCII since stuff is so small on my screen and yes i did read you post about the difficulty of changing the size of the tiles. i just wanna say the game is appealing enough for people to learn to play with ASCII in part due to the tooltips and mouse support. it's been a very smooth transition. being able to just mouse over or right click a symbol to know what it is instead of browsing some manual every time you forget is pure gold.
edit: while on the subject of tile size, would it be viable to just make a new alternative tile set with 4 tiles for each tile of the old ones? it would be a strict 4x zoom but since font size is adjustable it would not be necessarily too big. and i'm guessing it would not affect the UI since the UI doesn't consist of tiles. then again, the people that can't read the UI would still not be served. unless the letters would be replaced by 4 tiles each drawing the letter. just a thought, ignore if it was already a possible solution in the thread (not sure if i read it all) or if it's not possible.
edit2: while on the UI mouse over an enemy would be very cool to show how damaged it is in %. unless i'm missing something it does show for a split second but then disappears.