of course, after all my pride finally being rid of messing with player physics any further, i reopened unity and immediately discovered a problem: you can move laterally to slow your descent.

i did deliberately give the player some control over the direction of their velocity in the air so they could air steer... but this seems to have also had the drawback of allowing the player to "rotate" their downward velocity back up, which literally reduce their falling speed. back to the drawing board. the layers of separation between lateral and vertical velocities continues to increase internally.