Unless you're talking someone with some kind of clothing fetish, most people don't care what the character is wearing. In a game, most girls should be wearing something that is flattering but other than that it doesn't really matter what that is. Once significant progress is made with her, what most people care about is what happens when that dress hits the floor.
Well, I like the different options when opening a door, it makes the game environment feel a bit more alive.
And when the game progresses, the chars start loosing clothing.
Of course I like the sex scenes in these games, but seeing two people do the naked bretzel is easy, there are thousands of sites for that. Also there are more than enough adult games for quickies. If I just want to see quick sex scenes, I play Glamour.
Games like this one I play for the kinky stories and to see some good renders, I really can appreciate a good pinup. And if that pinup comes in some variation, I very welcome that.
Multiple clothing options for a scene basically doubles the render time for the exact same scene. It didn't progress any farther with or without the extra clothing options. The characters aren't doing anything different depending on the clothing. The only difference is the dev had to spend twice as much time rendering the scene. It also increased the amount of coding and testing required for the scene.
The same he does for clothing he also does for posing. Several repeatables show the same action with different poses AND different clothing for these poses.
We are easily talking about tripling the effort.
Btw, he stores only the differences in his images, has one basic naked image and then parts of it get replaced with the clothing items. I don't know if his rendering software supports that, but he could also only re-render that part of the image and ignore the rest.
Also his code is not just straight forward show one image after another. When performing some key actions, repeatable scenes change as well. The farther you progress with Alice, the more options will unlock on the couch or with the spiders, the events influence each other.
A lot of effort for the same amount of story? Yes, indeed.
But that is what makes this game great. That's what I love about it. Alexey puts a lot of effort into making it feel more alive.
He's like a cook who puts some effort into making his food taste better. Time well spent, I'd say.