Putting my comment on spoiler tag since it's long. Not actual spoilers.
I am just going to say your arguments follow from assuming a lot of stuff I have not said and that you are trying to infer from what I said, wrongly.
More important, though, I explicitly said that I was explaining why I think this is wrong for this game
under realistically constraints in development. You have literally said how are you solving the problem by each "route is independent of one another." This is the key assumption you don't see to have a problem lifting, while I think it is not a good approach, as it render choices irrelevant: what you do only matter in each route, but then you are simply optimizing individually, getting the best route individually and at the end choosing which route to go for or all together. Therefore, killing a lot of potential conflict that is natural in relationships.
I explicitly said that with enough time and resources you could do everything, but given the constraint and resources you cannot do a realistic harem and the individual routes while making them interact between each other. I thought I was clear about how, I think, there are higher priorities in the story than to develop character growth specifically to each character so that they would be happy by sharing.
We do not need to agree. But if you are going to say my logic is wrong, which tends to be wrong more time that correct,
do not change my assumptions.
Having said that, I need to concede two things:
The first, I meant what you said about self centered, so I did use the wrong word. I apologize for this. But it is not wrong (nothing wrong here, just an opinion, actually) that Emma would not just simply accept it without a lot of maturing, which was what I said, as it was explained by the scene. Would be kind of hard to argue that there is that growth if you are pushing everything to the end. On the very least, we would not be able to see it, which I think it is at the core of this novel, not getting the girl, but how and the consequences.
The second is that mine is one characterization of Lucy's inferiority complex. You could write yours. I don't consider that to be believable, but that is just me, in all honesty. I guess under a nicer perspective, your interpretation is equally valid.
But I never said I dislike harems. I said I dislike them when the premise makes no sense to me, as it does in this game. There are other games, say Deluca Family, that will not have harem that I could totally see it, given the way the setting is done and what we know about the characters. I can see it happening in Tales from the Unending Void too.
My opinion was that it was bad for this game. I even mentioned Once in a Lifetime, a harem game, as an example of a total marvelous game. This should answer your some of your questions. You only needed to read what I wrote before, but it is fine.
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