Yes, Cookiedraggy has mentioned that one reason for the change has been personal views on the story and character. However, I wish that was where it ended.
I wouldn't ask the developer of Echidna Wars to add normal sex to his game. If Cookiedraggy emphasized personal interests as the only reason for this change, I wouldn't ask him to revert it either. A developer's personal interests are the end all, be all for porn games because passion is the most important factor in whether a game like this ever gets finished.
It's because the developers have argued that getting rid of defeat-sex improves gameplay and opens up their creativity, that I feel it necessary to defend defeat mechanics. These arguments feel like heavy implications that this change was inevitable, and somehow objectively a better option. When, as many people have already mentioned, there are a multitude of games out there that work perfectly fine and have defeat-sex mechanics.
As an engineer, my experience with constraints has been that they actually increase creativity. Limitations force thinking outside the box which, as I understand it, is peak creativity. So I would think that grapples actually increase creativity. However, I recognize that creativity requires passion. So it makes sense that someone who never liked defeat-sex in the first place would find it debilitating to game design.
It's because of this that I think the developers brought this negativity upon themselves. They decided to phrase the change as being reversible if enough disagreed, provoking negative feedback. They decided to focus on how the change affected gameplay, provoking arguments. The change would have gone a whole lot smoother if they just announced from the beginning, "This is it, no going back. We just don't like defeat-sex and think of Kincaid as a more dominant type of girl."
Also, personally, I think this back-and-forth is more interesting than the usual "new build?", "100% save?", "how do I find ____?", and the rare "game dead?" that this thread otherwise consists of.