I'm sorry, but do people seriously think that he didn't plan the conclusion to this long in advance? You really think he didn't know what he was doing with this plot and then just made up a resolution on the fly? Because it seems to me the only people who think he was "creating problems for himself" were the people who thought it never made any sense and couldn't see a way out of it. Honestly, this was probably DPC's plan all along and just because none of you saw it resolving that way doesn't mean he didn't.

it is actually the opposite of what you say....
the problem is not having been surprised but that the first thing that almost any player thought was precisely that Patrick's blackmail made no sense, because for a bank , a financial institution, any institution, it would never have made any sense for Maya to take on a loan other than precisely the student loan. what Jill and Bella suspected from Maya's account was obvious to almost everyone as soon as Maya had spoken of double signature
to me the suspicion that DPC changed his mind in the running comes from the fact that the trajectory of Maya's problem was not at all continuous but lurching, what was supposed to be simple blackmail had to be continually enriched with aspects that made it inextricable for Maya.
At her maximum of drama, Maya not only didn't have access to the loan money, but her father could have destroyed her financially by forcing her to repay it without having used it. which was such an unsolvable situation that in reality not even Burke's scholarship would have really solved the problem, how do you repay a debt, that continues to grow, that you don't have access to?
as for the rest, I'm not going to argue about what you liked or didn't like, but I doubt you didn't get the vibe of everyone gathered around asking how Maya hadn't read what she was signing. asked by Jill who had been dancing for days to the rhythm Tybalt chose. one of the most unintentionally funny moments of BADIK
and even there, ironically, reading those fantastic documents proved useless, it was just necessary to face Patrick, another thing said when Chad was still a rival...