I think the four/five stars ATs are a design flaw and the dev is shooting himself in the foot.
The ATs get more intense scene-wise the deeper you progress, leading to sex etc. Four/five stars ATs are rolling back on the AT chain, but trying to keep the intensity by adding new scenes (5 start cosmopolitan mother) which the base (regular cosmopolitan mother) does not have.
The problem is, you need a shitload of content to support that. In addition to the normal AT scenes, you need relevant sex scenes to fill the void of taking away scenes from a "higher" AT you rolled back from - and the more ATs you have on top, the weirder this rollback gets.
That means, you cant really design "transitive" or stopgap ATs, you need to fill the whole chain with four/five star variants, which will either remain uncooked (as it is now, barely any difference to the regular AT) or take up too much dev time for too little gain, as the scenes are nice bonus, but you'd probably not want to remain on that AT longterm anyways.
So its either immersion breaking, ie. youre downgrading ATs, or youre adding fluff to ATs to keep up immersion, costing you valuable time that could be spent making new branching ATs.
Idk what the solution is, maybe adding "important" ATs that start branches, and only those get star variants, and you skip rolling back to anything inbetween (effort in writing, needs to make sense)?
For example, baseCharacter -> at1 -> at2, branches into two different paths at3,4 -> at5,6 -> at7,8 if you roll back from 7 or 8, you go back to five star at2, which has a bunch of new scenes, but you skip making variants of 3, 4, 5, 6.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk about game mechanics in a porn game.