First of I like sandbox style games, the problem is when they rely too much on the repetition(and the more girls you have, the bigger the problem can appear). So no, I don't just want a gallery(even though having a gallery in games feels like a standard practice for most games that I played). I might have sounded a bit angrier when I first posted due to unrelated circumstances.
I do very much enjoy the storied of the girls, it seems like there is a lot of potential content to discover with a lot of them(with all their paths or planned paths and cross paths). But let's assume you are going to do a second playthrough to explore those options, if you are saying that you are going to go through all the grind again without cheats I think you'll understand the problem. Sure for a first playthrough you'll want to read and discover pieces of dialog, but you can really see this mechanic falls apart at this point. Because you'll be going to do same thing until you get to the event where you can finally make a choice. You won't really be playing the game if you had to cheat just to get to those points. In a VN sure you'll skip the dialog, but after making a choice you'll start to see new content(in a good one at least). But here you'll be making the choice, and then it's a repeat until you can trigger the next event by repeating actions.
Which is why "grind" is not really gameplay, but I fully understand why it is part of a sandbox. You could ease it and make it feel more natural, if you have more events which characters that are connected to each other will both gain points(like the roommates's dinner) or having events that could give bigger bonuses based on what you wear and/or what you say outside of a date(you could even add what resource you have available as a modifier as this is a more core gampley mechanic). For example, if you go to band practice wearing leather jacket you'll gain a bit more points with the girls and they might say something extra(you could tailor this to all the places) and if you are energetic enough you might inspire them(could be a chance trigger even). But simply going up to all the girls and making making a check list of expending all the daily dialog + sending texts to all of them, feels a bit lackluster after a while.
That way you'll feel like you kinda paying more attention to how you interact with the girls, but I don't know if it is something people even care about or want.
Of course I don't really know shit about codding or how hard it would be to implement, I'm just trying to say that there is other ways to do sandboxes if you want to go with repeat actions as the main mechanic.
As for Sam, I made sure to always be available at 14:00 as I knew that when the call needed to come in. I even tried to walk around and back to the house in case that would somehow trigger it. But that didn't help, and now I don't know if it's a bug or what.