If you choose to believe many incest fans, that's all it ever was & all it was ever going to be & with the emphasis on M/S incest. Those, like me, who played from early on, know that there was back then & should have been, in future, a lot more to AWAM. Conducting polls acted as a form of market research & Dylan always topped the polls. One view was that this represented a wish by incest enthusiasts to have more Dylan & Sophia time. That seems a reasonable assumption. As the project had always been too big & ambitious without the assistance of the legendary, if not downright mythical "team," it seems the decision to convert the game into 'A Son & Brother,' was an obvious way to incease income, as well as to make it easier to manage.
Income from high level subscribers probably derives from incest fans, or AWAM wouldn't have gone wholly down the incest fest route & maintained that position, year after year. As far as raising the total number of all subscribers goes, the decision doesn't appear to have been particularly successful. There are, after all, many incest-driven games.
Sadly the "realism" and "class" promoted in the early years by the Dev had to vanish as AWAM became LCD incest. Whether followers believe that realism & class ever existed, or not, it's definitely the case that the game was unique enough to influence several imitators & to generate the massive volume of comments to fuel 3 threads & that's just on F95.
All the paths that weren't connected directly with incest have been abandoned, (though not 'officially'), or pushed far into all our uncertain futures. When the Dev said that Nathalie wouldn't be back for 12 years, (add another 2 or 3 for the L&P factor), it was clear to all concerned that the writing wasn't on the wall but written in 10ft high neon.
It must be great for incest fans, so at least somebody's enjoying the inexorable decline of AWAM.