Why not have the whole level map be visible?
It's plenty visible...if you have the screen resolution to handle it. The tiles themselves are 32x32, so on an 80x25 map you'll need a monitor with a 2560 pixel width. On my 1920x1200 monitor it's not bad at all: the game only has to scroll left and right, so I'm not missing much at a given point in time.
Trying to create 16x16 or 24x24 tilesets would be a lot of extra work, and I really doubt the current tileset is very shrinkable (that is, maintain high quality after compression). This may be worth looking into, though: I do agree that the graphical version has an odd disconnect with the console one when it comes to currently-available information. The GUI for the graphical version is getting a pretty significant facelift next version, so we'll try to see to it that the minimap is appropriately improved.
and has way less mojo
You're going to have to explain this part. The "bad looping" I can understand, and it's potentially something we can fix with some editing, but if you just don't like the music then you should probably go with something else. (IIRC, the MIDIs suffer the same looping problem, albeit more subtly.) Generally speaking, Kornel's trying to move away from the ID property stuff as much as possible, which means using sound and music that are under free-use licenses. The players, however, are free to modify their own sounds and music in whatever way they desire, so this is only an issue insomuch that the package released with the game may not have what you want.