Yeah, it's a major flaw in her character. I believe she has a kind of 'innocent until proven guilty' mindset, which means to her, everyone around her is worthy of some level of trust until proven otherwise. I'd describe it as being multi-leveled, with there being 3 levels: high trust, average, and low/no trust. She allows the new people in her life the average trust level, mildly believing what they say, and just conversing with them on the surface without getting personal. That's how it started out with Quinn. She took Quinn's word for the tuition and wasn't very skeptical about it, which turned out to be a huge mistake. As for Patrick, I believe she regarded him as 'high/average trust' as he was her father, and possibly they had a good relationship when she was a kid, which took a turn for the worse now.
My thoughts are that the attitude Quinn has towards Maya was induced by Maya bringing up the 'changing mothers' thing with Sage. At that point, I don't believe they've really truly been acquainted with each other, and that conversation too was right after Quinn 'offered' Maya the free tuition. I think she was afraid Maya would run her mouth about the offer to Sage, which although she could outright deny, could also raise suspicions about the business she was handling.
Quinn had it out for Maya because she was expecting Maya to be unable to complete her scavenger tasks. She wanted to deny Maya from being a HOT in a way that would be unsuspecting (considering that the HOTs scavenger hunt is a tradition), and make it seem like she was in no way involved with Maya failing to complete her tasks or quitting mid-way. Though not prominent, I do believe Quinn's reaction when she learned that Maya and Josy managed to complete their tasks (by asking Arieth), thus becoming HOT sisters explain some of this. She was slightly in disbelief, evidenced by her hesitation in this scene. Hell, Riona even whispered 'Checkmate.' into her ear right before:
View attachment 1240818
This is just my interpretation of her motives, though. Could be wrong and far from what DPC actually had in mind.
Nope, you can't switch the gender of the MC. If you could, we'd have 20 GB worth of data instead of the current 10, and it'd take forever to download, so I'm grateful for that.
I've never thought of Arieth as a female version of MC until now..... Thanks for giving me that thought... I hate it.