Settle my indecisiveness- Are the Pauldrons too large?

To clarify, the bat wings seem fine to me in scale, but I think the other element that is competing with the pumpkins right now for attention is the leaf tiers on the skirt. Maybe it will look better on an actual human and not just a drawing, but I think that might be where some of your indecisiveness is coming from. Because the pumpkins, bat wings, and bat wing boots look (to me) like they are the most important design elements of the dress. The wings are already great and eye-catching, the boots have a bunch of colors around them, so stand out (especially how sleek they look, love that juxtaposition with the poofiness of the rest of the design), but the pumpkins are the same colors as colors already used in the dress, so can easily blend in instead of being a focal point of the dress. Hence why I think they should be bigger, to pop better and really draw the eye, or small to help the wings and boots to be the only focal points and having the rest of the outfit feel more like a whole element, instead of being made up of multiple elements. I hope what I wrote made sense! I’m not sure I even followed it all that well, oops 😅 Please ask for clarification if anything I wrote was confusing or unclear!

I think you could actually make them even bigger. Your current design I think has the pumpkins fading into the rest of the details of the dress, just a bit. So either they should be scaled up to help them pop better (and maybe slightly tweak the colors to help with that), or they should be scaled down to blend in better and feel more cohesive.

The big shoulders balances out the big skirt in my opinion, very 1890's :D

the bigger the better, makes a good silhouette

I think a few reinforcement structures on the inside could help.