I personally like Zoe, but I'll fully agree to there being too many characters, especially ones added later to the game. Other games suffer from not enough characters, so that things either have to progress with the few ones there very slowly, or it ends up being a short game. But with the time loop element to the game, you're spending a lot of time exploring possibilities with the same characters over and over again. You can do a lot more with fewer characters.That's what they said in their stream in November when someone asked about Elizabeth. I don't know about Jessica's story being more fleshed out though. I actually feel that all the quest lines are kind of rushed and still on bones here, and that's mostly because they added so many useless side characters to the game that took time from the development. Zoe wasn't really needed, Sophie hasn't done anything interesting, Amy lands in to the same category and then there is Ellie's mom and Chloe whose existence in the game is just questionable. If they would've kept the focus on Elizabeth, Jessica, Megan, Ellie and Nicole, that would've allowed them to go more into detail with them and still have decently large and diverse catalogue of girls. But now that they say "we have covered Elizabeth's story pretty much all we wanted to cover" and "season three won't be what you think it is", that just gives you vibes that they have got bored to this game. So instead of going with the current concept, I think they are going to cut it in Season 2 and go for something totally different with Season 3, because this is still their flagship so leaving it to two seasons especially now that they got much audience to their Patreon from Steam would be kind of a suicide for them business vise, but changing it to something different will help them keep it fresh for another year and a half that it takes to finish the season.
I do think they explored the Elizabeth story well enough though. She was basically there as the easy level love interest to keep your attention as things built for the other characters. But I think the devs underestimated the number of milf/mother fans playing the game. When stuff stopped happening as much with Elizabeth to give other characters their time and because her story had run its course in their minds, it left people assuming there'd still be more content in the future and disappointed when there wasn't more. At the same time, we started seeing more new characters to slow down the progress with Ellie, Jessica, and Megan. So maybe that time and effort would have been better spent at focusing on Elizabeth? Many if not all of the new girls have been hot, but for the most part I'm playing this game for its incest element. Adding in a non-incestual love interest this late in the game and making them a way to slow down progress with the incestual ones is a bit frustrating.