For me, the problem with Eric was always execution. The concept of a pseudo turn-based strategy game where you have to diminish his influence and make progress with the girls at the same time, without doing anything Eric could use to diminish yours, culminating in you kicking him out and becoming the man of the house for good, is great. The idea that you wouldn't have even been able to gain influence over the girls without Eric coming on the scene and starting to nudge them along, only for you to swoop control of them and turn his own game against him is also good.
The problem is that -- respectfully -- no weg dev is a good enough game designer to construct a game in which this struggle for power would work properly, feel rewarding and not seem like you were being exposed to the dev's NTR fetish (even beyond the obvious bounds of it being part of a fail condition). Given that, your only options as a dev if you're not a big NTR guy are to basically eliminate the concept of Eric and go the Glamour route, or give players a very quick way of getting rid of him once he shows up (and basically make him the catalyst for the corruption of the girls without him actually doing anything).
What you end up with is essentially a free-roam visual novel (which is what most wegs are) rather than a true game with a requirement for strategy and execution by the player. That's fine -- I enjoy them myself -- but the dev effort to content ratio in those is not great, because the content is the game, and players blow through it quickly. At that point, the idea to add grind into the game starts whispering to the dev like the green goblin mask. Otherwise you just get delays, or the dev begins to get sick of the ratio required and quietly drops the game.
This isn't me advocating for Eric to be in this game or whatever, I don't really care. More of a musing on how all the BB remakes end up converging on the same structure/problems
