You are pretty late to the Party.
At the beginning it wasn't optional and was later added. As it happened in 0.21 it was a huge success.
The Main critique wasn't the Kink of Femdom per se. It was and for me still is. Octavia's personality.
The World is dying, Humankind is on the brink of extinction. The MC is the key to it. Instead of bringing him on her good side, she tries to force him to complete obedience. It makes no sense.
The Dev has stated this game is not about Domination. Which is bad executed. We have two and half updates which circle about the theme completely.
Femdom ok if it is optional and make sense.
Octavia: "The World is dying now come her for a spanking."
The Player: "What? NO!!!"
Does Octavia make sense to you, and why?
This game will not become a Male or Femdom focused game. That was never the Devs intention.
And I am a Patreon.
As a little inside to you. Daisy has 3 Minutes of screen time. Octavia is omnipresent in this game, even when she isn't on-screen. She has lost in every poll on Patreon to Daisy.
The fact is, she is not good implemented. There can't be another interpretation out of this results.
Octavia will make the game or break the game for me. Not because of femdom because of her overacting.
If your gripe is with Octavia being irrational as a character, then I don't have a bone to pick with you. You are 100% right that it's stupid that she prioritises giving you a spanking over either trying to bring you on the side of her regime by bribing/spoiling you/being nice to you or instilling fear in you/blackmailing/threatening you to ensure your cooperation. (the latter might be more consistent with the personality of a control-obsessed tyrannt, and after all she can keep sending agents to your time and therefore threaten with killing your family or friends if you don't choose to work for her, which would force MC to do so at least until he has an opportunity to turn the tables on her) Anyhow, I fully agree with you that from an internal consistency and narrative perspective, just having that "spanking" scene before any important business is discussed and/or settled was a terrible idea, and I'll even add to that that Octavia should've been written as a more intelligent character than she is, as becoming and maintaining power as a despot requires a lot of skills, most of which are not at all reflected in her actions. It is, for example, unbelievably dumb of her to not have any backup plan except for blindly trusting all of humanity's hopes on you...
There are also several other issues with the narrative, such as the MC doing sometimes very stupid things without any good reason or any choice for the player to stop him, (like when he just tries to return back home and operate the time machine by himself, getting caught in the process - any rational person kidnapped and put into that situation would bide their time, try to understand the new world they've been brought to, make connections, learn useful information about the people surrounding them, the history of the world or how the time travel technology functions, and only attempt to escape from this very dangerous organisation if and after they can formulate a good plan for doing so...) so I don't have any issue with you criticizing elements of the story, writing consistency and so on, as I have some issues with those aspects of the game myself.
However, the people I was talking about, who posted a lot of messages on the last 2 or 3 pages of this thread, do not, like you, criticize the narrative or point out plotholes and writing inconsistencies, but just complain about how much they hate Octavia, femdom or that there is a futanari character, (which, mind you, is a kink I dislike as well, but given that it's an optional side-character that's like that and the game had the tag for it all along, I didn't throw a tantrum that that character "ruins the game" for me...) and I find their behaviour childish given that the game advertises both of those kinks in its tags and they should've known what they're getting themselves into! Once again, my beef is not with you if this comment accurately reflects your views on the game, and I wish you a great rest of the day!