For the most part the puzzle worked as planned, however there were two areas that were sticking points and the nature of the puzzle meant everything was stalled until they were solved.
The first was the crossword.
My expectation was that people would see something that looked like a crossword, and then look for something that looked like crossword clues. Obviously this didn't happen, so I think I either needed to make the clues more obvious (number them?), put an explicit instruction somewhere else in the puzzle, or perhaps pre-fill in 3-down in the original clue since that would link the crossword to the clues more clearly. Just putting the clues under the crossword might have helped but would have defeated the idea of mixing everything up.
The other blocking point was the nearly final step:
Once you had "where is the truth" and "3+4+5=6" people realized they were connected but the leap to go to "where+is+the=truth" and then solve that was too much to expect people to make. Again I think another hint was needed here built into the puzzle. For example if the question said "If cross+roads=danger then what is the value of truth"? Although I worry that that would be more confusing than helpful.
The main thing I've learnt so far is that there needs to be more direction built into the puzzle for each of the less obvious steps. People shouldn't have to make large deductive leaps (particularly in a multi-step puzzle like this).