I hope the developers respond to this.

Thanks for the feedback! We've been working on balancing the game, so hopefully it'll feel less overpowered in the full game.

I experienced this as well. Hopefully the full game will indeed be balanced towards stuff. Perhaps also if you notice your cast dun really get into fights, you should be able to make note of it and thusly it'll be a lot more around a comfortable and harmonious episode or even season.

Oh and curious... does the least-happy audience drop off and you only keep certain top-most audiences 'cuz that is what the season seem to cater towards'?
Thusly you might keep the dramaqueens and Plumbers, plus garden fanatics cuz you keep having fights in the backyard and around water?

Or it is set in stone what audience carries over from episode-to-episode?

As the game progresses and you continue to unlock audiences, your new audiences will always appear the next day, but the remaining slots can be different day to day. There is an RNG aspect to it, so it's not entirely set in stone.