I'm going to have to strongly disagree here.
Mina isn't just a side chick you can fuck. She's an important character and a primary love interest. Her scenes deserve as much attention and care as the Carnations. There are a ton of choices in the game that allow us to shape our relationship with Mina, and they start before she's even introduced. So when we finally get a sex scene with Mina, it's not going be just because she's hot. And if the game treats it that way, it's going to feel wrong.
Which it did.
There's a brief moment in the middle of Mina's first sex scene where the main character has a bizarre monologue and imagines Mina strapped into some strange contraptions as if she were one of the Carnation's working girls. And it sticks out like a sore thumb if you are on the low toughness route where you have consistently voiced displeasure at what is going on at work. It completely pulled me out of that scene and really killed the mood. It wasted an otherwise great setup that had been building for a long while. If those thoughts were gated behind a high toughness score, then I wouldn't have seen them and the scene would've been perfect.
What makes it particularly odd, is that there is one brief moment in that scene gated behind a toughness score. Over 24 toughness and he'll think to himself "C'mon! Cum for me! One last time for me you dirty cunt!", while a lower score has him think "C'mon! Cum for me! One last time". A very small difference, but a very important one. It helps keep our character's actions consistent with what we have chosen in the past.
It's the small details that separate the good from the great. Little things like the difference between the MC being formal or informal with his boss, which is determined by a variable set by a choice you made early in the game. It helps make different playthroughs feel equally valid, and it shows that the developers care about each path equally.
This is fair enough - but again, what you are referring to is an internal state within the MC and it isn't a conscious choice. As you said, the scene would have worked well had that one image been gated behind a toughness score (I've never had a problem with it but then again, I've never tried to play a character that would have a problem with it). But I think you're missing my main point.
I'm not saying Mina doesn't deserve attention and care. Mina is my favourite and I want a great scene with her. I'm saying that girls like her and Hana are going to respond a lot differently to the MC doing certain things during sex because they are in a relationship outside of the competition, and that's going to limit what is possible to the point where it's almost a given that it will be more linear. There are things the MC can do to a Carnation and get away with because even if they don't like it, at the end of the day they are still in the competition to win, regardless if they think the MC is a cunt. That's why scenes with them can branch out in many different directions depending if you want to be nice or an asshole. They will be back at the club and doing tasks with the MC regardless. He can play it off that he was just doing his job, and the show goes on.
It would be a poor story if the MC did the same thing to either Mina or Hana and there wasn't any consequences to him doing something that they didn't consent to or they had a big problem with after the fact (but did in the heat of the moment). And that makes the actual mechanics of the game difficult because now you're going down the path of locking out Hana/Mina for any players who want to indulge their inner asshole and creating what is in a sense a bad ending to the story. So the creators are naturally limited to exactly what kind of choices they can have if they want to keep both Mina and Hana as main characters in the game, because
their opinion/desire matters if the story is to continue.
Of course, they
could go down the path of writing extra scenes for these bad situations (and then write the next sex scene the MC has with them as makeup/hate sex, which would be super hot), but the whole point of the original post was about reducing the amount of time that is being spent between updates, not increasing them.
