Well you have to understand a few things. One, the Family isn't going to be the early games primary focus. But I do have to build them first since the MC lives with them. The neighbor will actually be the introductory character to a lot fo the mechanics, and she'll be a lot more forgiving than Diane, Becky, or Gina. Those three will be for all intent and purpose "advanced characters" to pursue, due to the automatic difficulty of them being related. Also, Social media is only about halfway done being built. There's a lot of other options I plan to add to it in the next update. I developed Diane's second Archetype so that I could design the systems needed to convert a character from one Archetype to another. I picked Diane because honestly hers was probably gonna be the easiest with what was planned to be in the game. It will become easier once I add in more actions. Every action gives xp, and almost every action builds up topic generation. The only RNG in the game happens to be when browesing videos online and watching tv. There currently isn't a way for you to generate Marketing topics, until you've converted Diane over to her second archetype. Then it becomes one of the topics she likes to talk about. So you'll need to mix in some neutral topics about social media (such as internet profile) with some of her preferred topics, like house chores.
As for your suggestion. With every action giving xp of somesort, and every conversation also giving xp from topics they talk to you about, I think the amount is fine. My intention is for the journey to be as rewarding as the skill up...but it's just super early in development right now so the journey seems really short...which just leaves the skill up. And when I build a character, I have to build it with the idea that the player has been playing the game for months. So I understand that you may feel like you "Have" to get all the content, and to do that, you have to Grind. But a lot of that is just how early in Dev we are. I'm sure there will be people that Grind like mad. There always are. But, Ideally it won't feel required in a few builds.
You have to convert Diane to her second Archetype to get her shower scene. She's too uptight as generic Mother. Always locking the door, and bugging you about cleaning :/
Shopping hasn't been fully developed, nor the Mall, or movies. I rendered as much as I could realistically code into the game, which was a decent amount, but there's still a long way to go before the current skill list is finished being implimented. I'll keep the changelog in game updated every build. And saves will carry over. So don't worry too much about that.
