A fellow veteran lol, but yea I pretty much agree. I especially do not play anything linear since I can just read a doujin without being troubled with bad gameplay. Sad part of all of that is that most games just aren't innovative enough and it feels like creativity is declining sadly, but there are some great ones.
I agree with your mentality completely. For me I sometimes see games with good renders but a complete devoid of choices and I get turned off. The best in terms of NTR VN is probably still Anim, with their branching story FLOW feature that they created.
In terms of most games, it's not that it's not innovative enough, it's more like the barrier of entry to create "games" with tools like RPGMaker MV and Renpy (western) is very low. So you have more people creating, yet they just don't have the skills to even learn about using plugins, let alone creating plugins. Or they're using ineffective processes doing things manually where if you actually can code, you would automate and decrease time / effort.
I've probably played over 300 NTR games by now, and I only really have about 50 or so saved in my harddrive. Most games I just delete them and never want to see them again.
It's quite interesting from a perspective of someone whose country talks about Universal Basic Income (basically give people money to do nothing). Proponents argued that UBI will increase creativity and people will finally have time to do what they love (make art, music, games, books, etc).
You may get increase in "creative works", but the quality is low. People who are unemployed or work menial jobs tend to not have the brains to do "creative work" anyway. Making a living doing creative work means you actually have to be good.
