I don't disagree with the progression of passives having downturns and parts of the progression where you grow weaker as a physical combatant, but the end result should be that a endgame slutty Karryn with a dedicated sex build should be stronger than a midgame Karryn with a lower slut level at sexually defeating enemies, but that is typically not the case.
The issue stems from two core dynamics of the system imo:
1) Enemies always scale with a NG/NG+ Lvl 1 Karryn. If you're progressing the game normally, your combat abilities will always dwarf any slutty behavior. Enemies in turn will have beefed up in response before your slut skills have gotten off the ground. The only real alternative is to intentionally lose early to get the easily accessible skills so that you don't have an over abundance of combat passives & levels. Unless you're on Prisoner difficulty and just want to do a run from Lvl 1 (ie, Descension), there is no real point to even going about it that way imo.
2) You get too many passives before you can reasonably use sex skills unless you hard focus on specific ones. The combat ones are pretty well spaced out, but the sex ones go from 0 to 50 to 100 in most cases. Karryn should honestly be able to engage in more of the action out of a sense of necessity/efficiency before she hits the downward spiral. It feels pretty unnatural compared to how combat progress works with buying edicts and accessories. Also on the subject of edicts/accessories, most of the ones that make slut build progress easier are too expensive for the early game or straight up aren't accessible for a good while.
My counter argument is every single build is bad, everything you do eventually leads to dead ends and you either grind it like a mobilephone game for hundreds of hours, the way Rem intended, or cheese the hell out of it.
The whole game is built on a timer, so having dead ends is perfectly fine (especially with how NG+ works). The game just needed to balance stuff a bit better (Descension overall does that imo).
Also, while I won't say that the game isn't a grindfest under the right (or wrong?) conditions, but unless you're playing on Prisoner difficulty + intentionally gimping yourself (Challenge Mode), a single run should never take a long time. Multiple runs shouldn't take any longer than normal $50/60 game releases.
My issue has always been that the game doesn't really explain any of its pitfalls, so it's almost all trial by fire. Unless you have FromSoftware quality, that's going to be a hard sell.
