Thanks for the detailed and very well written answer.
For instance, TiTS has this horribly written encounter with a bunch of fanwank OC characters where they blow out your airlock and then force you into this long, complicated multi-scene encounter on rails, and I just want to strangle the writer every time it happens.
I think I know the exact scene you are talking about lol. Yeah the ratio between text and game mechanics in TiTS is not great, something that LT deserves credit for.
although its Patreonizing gives it a huge mixed moral message
In other words, you find it strange how arbitrary the cutoff point on the more extreme content is? It's funny now that I think about, how this game has animal morphs, incest (with inbreeding), slavery and extreme body proportions, but full feral and descriptions of penises like cut/uncut is a nono. I'm sure part of it is due to funding and dumb legalities but it seems to me the "moral line" has long since been crossed.
The other thing you mention is the shallowness of the rich customization, which others have also echoed. What is nice though is although the game doesn't make use of these parameters, its easy to expand and add content for later on once the framework is already in place.
I adore that this isn't a futanari playground out of the box where at least half of the female population is packing sausage
Yeah its funny how almost every other game in this category is like that. I guess its the "best of both worlds" solution that caters to the widest demographic.
The slave framework does feel disconnected with the RPGness of the rest of the game for sure, and it's in a super shallow state at the moment. But the idea is very nice, although (to me atleast) it wouldn't matter whether companions or slaves, the ability to manage npcs makes for really fun and rich "built your own world" type of gameplay.
it goes to great lengths to ensure that you are in control
Likely my biggest complaint of this game as fixing this is a low hanging fruit (number tweaking). The game has atrocious balancing, to the point where it damages the game loop. You never have to put thought to your decision making because there is never any actual "loss". It literally babies you from the very start.
One thing that was pleasantly surprising is people liking the "build your own sex scene" mechanics. I thought with all the VN's that top the popularity ratings on this site that people only wanted hand written static scenes so that's cool.
If you haven't already dug through the suggestions.txt file in the src/com/lilithsthrone/res/doc folder, that file is a play-by-play of everything wrong with accepting player suggestions without a content filter.
For sure, developer seems to be pretty big on the whole biting off more than they can chew and taking on unreasonable workloads (assigned by themselves or suggested by others).