If you don't understand how branching strategy affect development pace and release quality maybe you work in that part of IT that fill excel files.
You can use simple math to understand how bad branching is.
You have a game wife and mother where it takes a solar year in order to advance 4 story branch for 1 day of Sofia adventure
And the outcome will be, you moaning like kids (AWAM) thinking that the developer is milking money and not delivering......
Sure, if you consider backend development a "fill excel files" job.
Jesus, AWAM has to be the worst example you can make. Despite high quality renders, and relatively better plot than most porn games, it only has 3.2 rating, way lower than the score it should objectively have. Do you know why that is? Because players keep complaining that the author is milking the game. L&P has a bad rep in this site, not because of the branches, but because the author loves to take his sweet time. It's not the fault of branching paths that is making AWAM so tediously slow, it's because the author is just slow. AWAM is actually quite linear and there aren't many branching in AWAM. Occasionally it branches into two paths but those paths quickly merge into one.
Imagine that AWAM is linear instead. That would still make the game so slow. Each update only produces 1 or 2 scenes. If you think that somehow small number of scenes is the fault of branching then you clearly don't understand how math works. A game could be linear and produce 10 scenes in one path. A game could also have 2 branches with 5 scenes each - and that's me being generous because branching paths reuse assets. They would still have the same number of 10 scenes. If AWAM is a linear game, people would still be (rightfully) bashing the author for bad development cycle.
A better example is Our Red String. It has a lot, and I mean a lot, of branches with two protagonists, male and female, each having their own branches - and it went well at the start. The author was developing the game at a steady pace, producing renders consistently. But she has suffered in the later stages because she didn't plan for the story, and she kept adding stuff from Patreon polls that complicate the story. What she got stuck at was continuing the story, and that also slowed the development of the art, because the art comes after writing. But again, the fault isn't on the system, although it certainly made things more complex, it's the fact the author didn't make the consideration when she added so many unnecessary things that further cluttered the development.
