I added my responses above.
I'm firmly of the opinion that you can't have big, powerful scenes if there aren't smaller, mundane scenes between them to make the big ones stand out. Perhaps I just have a higher tolerance for filler?
Pretty much fully agreed.
I'm a bit iffy on the whole Maya/Josy/Jill development but that's because a majority of it just seems to play out the same way no matter if you are dating/hooking up with none, just jill, just maya/josy or all. Really all that changes is that the MC has 2-3 less lines of inner monologue if he's not dating them all at the same time and you don't get to tease Maya unless on the M/J path.
All the other points I agree on however. Especially when it comes to Sage and Derek/Wendy.
For Sage: Sure, just sitting with her during lunch would have her drop a line about how writing her dissertation is gonna be a nightmare but at that point you could easily think "Makes sense party girl doesn't take her education seriously and is annoyed she has to work for it.". Only the library scene shows you her actual work ethic and in how high of a gear she is 2 weeks into the semester, so her lunch comment turns from "party girl complaining about college" into "a student having put lots of thought into how to get her dissertation done and having realized that even starting now she will be going through hell". Shows Sage in a bit of a different light, even if a lot of people already assumed she wasn't gonna be superficial and lazy/dumb.
And when it comes to Derek: It actually leads to something I didn't expect for him. Character growth. Sure, it's just a short exchange where you tell Wendy you'll talk to him about it but when you actually do it's after you've seen Derek depressed for most of the Episode and right after he explains that he needed to work himself up to even be called "asshole" by Ashley all those days and how just being completely ignored instead of rejected sucked. In that scene I really liked it that you didn't have to feed him the answer but Derek on his own notices that what he had been doing to Wendy is similar to what Ashley was doing to him. Pretty self-aware for a character that was mostly comedic relief so far, so I'm happy to have the short library scene where Wendy approaches you be the set-up for that.
Also if you compare it to many other freeroams this one was actually very informative. You have the Sally/Xanax scene showing you that at least 1 or, possibly, soon 2 Nerds are also tied into the drug plot. Likewise you are told 2 things about Quinns methods: 1) she tries to make her clients get other people hooked as well (though this was already implied) 2) she might be making enemies all around campus by having gotten people hooked on drugs and then raising the prices on them. That just increased the number of possible enemies Quinn could have by a lot which might be relevant later.
And even if we disregard the restoration minigame the info that the Library is understaffed also tells us how unlikely it is that Bella will take over and teach Cathys classes all of a sudden (for people that assumed this would happen soon).
If we compare that to most of the freeroams when still staying with Maya and the freeroam when staying with Derek it has far more plot relevance and as far as the pixel hunt goes I'll take the pixel hunt over Bellas damn flowers/plants every day of the week. I sense a pattern with Bella being tied to fairly annoying freeroam-minigames
