that is because you know how the game works, that is not how a fresh player see the game, they have no clue that you HAVE to repeat the exact same process with the exact same dialog X number of times to get the trigger to finally work
I can't recall if this was the thread or some other clone of this game where I mentioned that the MAIN UI screen needs to have a clue to the progress or regress you're making, having to click 3-4 times to open the quest window, select quest, select hint, AND scroll down when it doesn't fit into a window - that is bad UI design
if there is repetitive task, make something like a progress bar around a character icon in the main UI that is increasing/decreasing based on player actions, it is simply too tedious to check things we, players, have access to after each dialog day after day
for instance here: I colored the border around the character icons to indicate something, Gray around Anns icon = no actions possible (either at this time of day, or in general, progress with other characters required to progress further with her), Green - "incomplete progress", or "progress possible", Yellow with "blinking" - show "immediate action possible" on this UI screen
View attachment 2177456
then for repetitive tasks something like this around the character icon could be extremely useful: green can indicate progress, red can indicate regress, like you're losing influence, or the counter reset or decreased or whatever
View attachment 2177457
this way the UI gives you hints, instead of torture and having to go out of the game and google walkthroughs and dig through threads like this for clues on how to do what
don't get me wrong - the hint system in the questlog already provides lots of clues, but since there are multiple characters, multiple quests, that is just too many things to keep in the head, especially when the blood flow is compromised to that particular head...
so "playing" this game doesn't bring sense of achievement, but a relief when you finally manage to get anywhere, this I imagine is a big turnoff for a lot of people for the sandbox type games, because all of them seem to suffer from poor UI and cryptic hints that provide next to no useful info on what to do, just that there is something to do, and when you add poor RNG on top of that, you just want to erase this whole "experience" from your mind and move on
and this isn't too hard to implement either, very little modification to the code would be needed and few sprite images made in PS, no rendering required even