Sadly (for me, happy for you), no way we are getting a harem ending. DPC just doesn't roll that way. One of his favourite things to do is seduce you with candy and then rip it away. Here is university full of all different kinds of woman and you want to at least sample them if not collect them all. At first DPC lets you do it and that's the insidious nature of it. Once you get a taste for it, then he begins to throw in consequences and closes off routes when you have your fingers in too many honey pots whereas in rl no one would care if you sleep around (men or women) at first year university. It's the one time and age you're "supposed" to do it.
I like the replayability...to a point. There are a lot of women in this game and I don't like having to create a new save for every one of them just to see all of the best content and lewds. Especially when you consider how long this game will be and how choices in ep. X can result in unforeseen problems in ep. X + 4. I dread the day I have to start over yet another new game and fast forward through 16 episodes because one little thing I did in ep. 10 fucked me over. It wasn't so bad when there were 4 episodes, but it's becoming a chore to play through some of the less desirable game moments (ex. D&G, english tests, Jill's meth face, rebound guy, Lynette diary mammaries memories, etc.) that you have seen countless times. I gave up. I'm riding out my manwhore save for as long as possible until attrition ultimately claims every girl. I assume at the end I'll be left with only Arieth. She is probably the only one DPC won't have throw a hissy fit when you refuse the exclusivity ultimatum that every girl will eventually throw at you.
To me, the fundamental problem with Harem endings is that the always feel artificial, like the writer just glued all the individual girls' paths together into a single superset. For a harem to really work, each girl's path to the harem would need to feel different than it would to pursue her individually. Even if all the girls have a personality that would accept a harem (already a limiting feature), there's still a big difference between a monogamous relationship and being part of a crowd (even more so if she's involved with some of the other girls, too).
Of course the problem with that is that it vastly increases the amount of work for the dev. It also makes a harem ending feel sort of bittersweet. Everyone can be happy with the new arrangement, but there's always going to be that nagging sense of what might have been if only the MC had picked one girl alone. To me, that's what would make the whole experience worthwhile. But I suspect it wouldn't sit well with others who just want the happily ever after in a very large bed ending.
As for the problems of replayability, I see your point but I don't think I can agree. I've played a lot of these games with branching content, but I don't always have much desire to every branch. Heavy Five, for example, has zillions of possible options to explore, but I just lost interest in all of them because despite liking the premise I couldn't get invested invested in the plot or the characters. But in BaDIK, even content I'm not particularly interested in (like Bella) still feels worth seeking out.
I think the idea of branching options is necessary to make our decisions meaningful. Ideally those options should have enough contextual clues to give you some idea of the likely outcomes. I think BaDIK generally succeeds with that - witness the very fact you're pessimistic about getting a harem ending - but in the end that's always going to be a bit subjective.
I can totally understand the frustration of liking some of the game's content while still disliking large portions of its gameplay, but I don't think there's a simple solution. Even the best mods suffer because its trying to fundamentally alter the the core of the game. A mod that lets you swap variable easily is probably the best option; it's a huge time saver for those interested, but I feel like the accessibility is inevitably going to diminish the fun of seeing the different outcomes. A more ambitious mods that try to splice all the disparate paths together strike me as akin to re-cutting "Finding Nemo" into a police procedural: a skilled editor might be able to pull it off, but the end result is still going to be a
wildly different experience.
If you respond to an extreme position with an extreme one, you are not doing yourself a good service.
are all sluts at BR? is this really your answer to the fact that Jill has friendship only with a teacher? and that she makes friends on the fly with the only girl (who would also answer to the generic identikit of slut... but in the positive sense) towards whom she knows the only boy she has ever been interested in has feelings?
BADIk is an extremely light story, with no particular clockwork mechanism that makes people cry out for a miracle, where almost every situation is handled according to emotional outbursts that justify any outcome (they all run away for the least believable reasons ..)
but there is only one point on which I don't agree with you at all: the fact that there is this extreme attention to detail, DPC takes great care in creating "verisimilitude" especially in the dialogues, where he tries to take into account everything that happened, but then blatantly ignores certain situations, which would have their own importance, but would complicate his work.
so we have Chad's shoes in Troy's room (how many times did it happen to you to leave your shoes at the house of a girl with whom you had a clandestine relationship? did you come back barefoot?), and at the same time Josy is punished by her parents for having dinner with a boy (if Mc stays it makes sense, otherwise not at all. or do you want to tell me that Josy's beloved father is more bigoted than Maya's father?) and many other intersections that for simplicity DPC has decided simply not to handle
BADIK is an exceptional entertainment, which is light years from the average of the games of this genre (mainly because of the very low average), and probably will also have a positive effect as an example on other productions. but it is a soap opera, a telenovelas, not the Murder on the Orient Express
Hang on, why isn't BaDIK similar to Murder on the Orient Express? I'm a fan of classic murder mysteries, but there are plenty of people who would consider them relatively low brow entertainment. If AVNs ever go mainstream, BaDIK seems like a good candidate to be one of the classics in 40 years time.
As for verisimilitude, that's always going to be a bit subjective. The real world operates largely at random, so it's not like a world without coincidences would feel particularly realistic. It's always going to be incumbent on an author to structure the 'external' events of the story in such a way that they support and reinforce it. That's what makes a story different than just a collection of things that happen, after all.
The art is in making the 'random' events that happen in support the story feel grounded within the story rather than purely at the behest of the author. We can try to come up with objective criteria for that, and they can be helpful in extreme cases: Bella vaporizing Tybalt with her heat ray vision after being dosed with radiation from the unexploded atomic bomb in her locked room, while potentially very satisfying, does seem inconsistent with the world as presented. But for less outlandish cases, in the end it's often going to boil down to two things when a potentially implausible event occurs: do the characters' reactions to it ring true, and are the consequences of that event and/or the various reactions interesting to observe?
On those counts I would say BaDIK has far more successes than failures. There have certainly been failures: I don't like the way the Jill blackmail subplot has been handled; I felt the resolution to the Maya/Josy crisis in Episode 4 did not fit the events that caused the crisis; I don't understand why Sage's fuckbuddy would automatically worry about being a rebound guy after she breaks up. These are problems with the story that do diminish my enjoyment of it. But there are a lot of other parts of the story, and they work far, far better. As a result, on the whole I consider BaDIK a strong net positive.
No one is required to share that opinion, and if the game is much less of a success for you, that's fine.
But I think that's a far cry from saying the game is poorly written or thought out. On the contrary, I see a very well written game. Characters have consistent dialog that does not feel stilted. There are very few grammatical errors (or programming bugs). The concepts and characters of importance are established before they begin driving the plot. Even the outlandish twists are always foreshadowed in retrospect (and sometimes in foresight, as with the Chad/Troy twist).
To the extent that I can make objective judgements about the craftsmanship of this game, I'd have to call it very high. The fact that there are practical limits on player choices, or that some choices combine ancillary outcomes, is not a mark against the game, it's a necessary nod to reality.