So, I was thinking about this at work, because you know, when am I not thinking about Eternum, and I had a thought.
Branching would make sense under one condition - that it increased the total number of scenes per release. How, you ask.
I’m not an expert, but I believe that once you set up a certain render or animation, i.e. pose the characters, set up the lighting, etc. it’s not that hard or time consuming to re-run that render/animation with another character skin. So our two branching scenes would be the same scene... just with a different LI skin. Minimal increase to development time, but now you get to pick which of the girls you want.