Graham has hair below the neck.
Your very recent fact-finding trip was to the US (just a random thing, eh?). If DMD was set in an imaginary place, why bother with all the usual taboos? Why wait 11 updates to then mention : "Oh well! This story takes place in Neverneverland". Surely, you're better than that.
The story mentions money (as in $) several times. The only country that speaks predominately English, the population is predominately Caucasian, the outdoor DMD scenes fit the climate(having to catch a 3-hour flight south to go to the beach disqualifies Canada and Oz) is the USA.
It seems your fact-finding trip was badly needed...
1) I've been studying American history and culture for ten years now at an academic level, I'm about to complete a PhD in American studies, I've been in the States several times, taught in a college there for a whole year once, so no, I don't think I needed a fact-checking trip.
2) As a matter of fact, my recent trip in the US was for research purposes, and I mean university research, I buried myself in a library reading postmodernist theory and XIX century lierary criticism. DMD is an important project, but it is definetely not my main job, and if you think that mrdots leads a studio rich enough to send its collaborators around the world just for the sake of enhancing the verisimilitude of the game's setting I'm afraid you are gravely misguided.
3) Whatever you might think of it, we decided long ago to avoid as many references as possible to any real place in our world, so to maximize the potential for players' identification wherever they live. You might as well imagine that the game is set somewhere in Europe, with an English "dub" and a loose adaptation (dollars) for an American public. I myself like to think that DMD is simply set "out there". That said, you are completely entitled to think that "your" DMD is an American story - that's actually exactly the result we hoped to achieve: every player can decide where the story is taking place without being disrupted in his/her belief by sudden references to actual places.
4) As for the hair, you know what I meant.
Actually I think there might even be an in-game dialogue clarifying the issue once and for all in the next instalment - not sure though. Be it as it may, at least in that very specific respect DMD is indisputably a story set in a imaginary world.