You may well be spot on. The worst thing IMHO, a dev can do, is the old poll the supporters and let them choose the direction my story will take. NO. That is for IN GAME decisions but the story line, is up to the author to create. A tribute to a game, or song, or book, or movie...is not a rip off of said muse. It's to honor. I for ex, still find Cohabitation to be one of the better slow build corruption games out there. The artwork is bland and not to my tastes, but the game is challenging. If I had the coding chops, and the art chops, I'd love to do a tribute game. Using models similar (very similar) to what are used in Extra Credit, then do animation, maybe instead of being one niece in the house, it is twins and their next door neighbor bestie and her little sister. Maybe the brother is out of the picture, and the sis-in-law is a lonely single parent widow. Lots of variations could be used, which would not make the game a rip off, just a similar theme.
But honestly, how many themes are there? How gddmn many land ladies do we have to bang, before we start calling that whole trope...a rip off? How many MCs Dad's have to be dead, before THAT becomes a rip off? How many innocent little sisters, and/or arrogant big sisters; do we have to fuck before we call THAT a rip off? How many lecherous old men renting out a spare room to a naive, innocent, college age virgin; before we call that a rip off? (And when precisely was the last time anyone met a college aged virgin???)