After thinking about it a bit, I think there should be less routes and choices locked by points to give more of a "free will" to the characters and the reader. Having certain routes locked behind certain choices makes sense, but generally more options and freedom>less options and freedom. Like for example with the darrel route you're forced to make ethan as much of a sniveling weakling as possible, hence he gets a lot of hate. Also would get less people complaining about route locks. In theory having a complex route system is cool but in practice it's a heavy inconvenience that also necessitates detailed walkthroughs. if that's just how you like to design your game that's fine just that from a player standpoint it's not as fun. Also for example on the cuck route the only real way to test nat for loving ethan and putting their marriage first is if you have the choice to stop because one or both of them change their minds, and for that choice not to have some sort of arbitrary requisite. Obviously certain behavior should have certain requirements, but not all. Rather, it shouldn't feel like one misstep can screw your route. The route triggers obviously matter that decide what happens in the following scene, but what happens during said scene should be less pigeonholed by what you want to happen in the one after it.
It's actually a very common problem especially in rpg games where their goal was to create the illusion of freedom with look at all these dialogue choices, but when looked at closely there's very narrow pathing you have to take depending on route, so the choice is actually completely artificial, and actually playing the game you feel exactly that way, like you don't have a choice.
Take your latest update where she invites darrel over thinking ethan will like it. You want to add a choice where he decides he doesn't like it either before or after they fuck. You can add a sex scene using the nat resource model or whatever its called, but instead of darrel use ethans model and have almost exactly the same sex scenes, and you can use that scene either as their second video that they record together, or as their sex scene in liu of hers with darrel. On top of that it also makes the routes easier to manage since they run more or less parallel with each other except your choices are changing what happens in the moment, as opposed to having for example your parallel of the same sex scene that came from both the standard cuck route and nat reluctant route, but what it actually was was a maze where two routes ended up at the same place just with different text. It's messier from a pathing perspective. It would make just as much sense for you to give nat a choice to be angry at ethan for his cuck obsession, and for that choice to be yours recurring at points rather than decided by the bottleneck you had to take at the start of the game. You can make a choice where ethan isn't supportive of nat getting fired and that's what sets her off(also a choice that is given to you from her perspective) rather than it happening only if you make the correct 10 choices in a row at the start of the game. That way people can push the buttons that they want to push and the game becomes more about exploring what the buttons do for curiosities sake, rather than trying to solve a puzzle. Like during the hotel scene you get the choice whether to go full cuck or whether to make it into a threesome, and none of those choices are point gated, and that's great design because it gives you the player full control over what happens, which makes it a good scene. The only better that could have been done there was to give nat more choices on how to involve ethan, since she only had the one of whether its a threesome or not.
Put it this way, playing this game blind should feel good rather than a bunch of people coming begging for route advice or how do I get x scene. If it's a coding nightmare then fair enough, just my 2 cents. on the other hand the amount of investment you have to have to get each different route and interaction makes them more meaningful so its kind of reminiscant of an old school rpg where it's addicting as fuck even though it's full of choice bottlenecks. It's probably not realistic to redo the whole game code for the sake of neatness but I believe it's something to consider for future games or updates.