Not to be demanding, but what do you mean by well-designed? Is it that LT has reusable gameplay mechanics, instead of using ad-hoc scripting or just writing with no actual gameplay effects?
You are definitely not alone. The writing doesn't value brevity and often takes long detours to explain things unnecessarily. In some cases like you say, it tries to justify not letting you do unwanted things by telling you how you think and feel.
You're right, the sex system is a major factor other games lack. I wish there was more effort in refining the sex system; I don't think it scales well to group sex, and I wish there was a middle ground between quick sex and having to work out 2+ orgasms to placate some partners.
Rebalancing is mostly hypothetical, because it's unlikely LT will be reformed. The dev probably won't do it, and other people don't have the legal rights. My hope is that a new game will be informed by this discussion.
With that said, I'm not sure a game like this strictly needs to have expenses. Many RPGs just assume the player will eventually get infinite money and accordingly not make money especially useful by itself. It's hard to balance a free market economy, because you can spend money on anything and that means both income and expenses have to be tightly controlled. Slavery makes it harder, because fetishists love it and probably want it to be powerful and lack risks or downsides, while other people strongly want to avoid using it. Slavery is also passive income, so to balance it there need to be meaningful consequences for letting time pass, which you possibly do not otherwise need to come up with.
If you don't spend time trying to tighten all the screws on the money economy, you can spend that time making combat actually fun, or adding other engaging content. And then to the extent necessary, you take rewards away from the money economy and add them to this new content.
In LT specifically, money is too powerful because the mall, slave market, and custom enchantment system combine to give you almost everything, and various pretty obvious money exploits exist to get full access to everything on offer easily.
This should be fixable by updating people less often if the player can't observe changes in their state. In some cases, you can possibly get away with not updating them at all until they're observed, and then doing all the updates at once.
In a different game, a good way to get rid of excess adult children in a pre-modern economy would be to send them off to seek their fortunes in a distant city. Except that in LT, you live in that city. Oops!
