Thanks, GendoIkari, for playing and your suggestions!
Having put in a flurry of initial improvements, my next priority is improving the layout of the home screen. I hope that resolves several of your points--the separate inventory screen, the double Hero display, etc.
I created the Advanced Avarice skill to let the player open chests faster. I didn't want to let it go too fast because the delay there helps pace the game. However, maybe I should let that skill scale significantly better for obsolete chests. FWIW, the chests go in a stack (last in, first out) so if you're plowing through 10000 bad chests and buy 5 good ones, you'll open the 5 good ones first.
The item coloration roughly corresponds to rarities popularized by Warcraft and copied many times elsewhere: green = uncommon, blue = rare, purple = epic. As the chests get better there's a little bit of inflation, so a green from one chest is typically as good as a purple from two chests down, and a purple from a gothic chest isn't as unusual as a purple from an enhanced chest.