I mean, at least one of the LIs was also putting sone secondary effort into banging her daughter, so there's that....
That's actually a good point. Had you spent a bunch of time developing secondary character depth the plot advancement would have slowed even more, so that's a tough pickle.
That makes me curious though. If I may ask you a game development craft question-- If you had to start over again and could remedy the "heavy mistake", how would you do it? Would you just put additional content in early, or replace some of the current content with character-building, or reduce the size of the cast? And if one of the latter to, what/who would have been mostly likely chopped (or shifted to Arc 2 or whatever)?