Personally, I think the games lack of direction was to its benefit, in a round about way. Claire's Quest is unique in its breadth of content and choices, like two play-throughs can be quite different from each other. While the different branching paths do indeed cause issues due to it having no singular end point that makes sense, as interactive porn, I find it enjoyable just how consequential the choices are.
Games with this many choices, different scenarios and branching paths are usually saved for text-based games. The fact you can dump 15+ hours in one playthrough, go back to the start, and dump another 10 hours in an very different playthrough by itself makes Claire's Quest stand out. Like, sure, it means we likely won't see version 1.0 for a very, very long time, but I'm okay with that because when it does come out, Claire's Quest is gonna probably be one of, if not the single greatest RPG maker Adult Game, bar none. The quality of art, actually consequential player choices, and sheer amount of content is already nearly unrivaled by other games, and Claire's Quest also isn't borderline word soup.
It does put a monumental task in front of the dev though, and makes it hard to see where any of this is going, but in this case, the Journey is absolutely more enjoyable that the Destination.