Very understandable as time is limited in what can be done but tbh I too hate playing branching path games that are bloated with choices as the only ones I like would be the ones that just have the choices to select the path and then it goes semi Kinetic like this game does, as one does not have time to play a game with enough paths to look like a tree lol.That is about right, except different paths might have some wildly varying dialog (for instance the M+D Locked Out paths have very different dialogs going on as to their motivations and their romantic interactions with each other, even if the images that accompany that dialog are the same).
But I made a very deliberate choice not to have branching paths, that would require creating graphical assets that would be mutually exclusive between branches. E.g. you can see all the content for any character in one play-through, unless you cut off the path for that character. Being a one-man show and already incredibly strapped for time, it felt like a waste of time to create a lot of content that is seen by only half the players or less (depending on the number of branches and distribution of choices).