That did seam to be the impression many players had. Is this spelled out by LJ somewhere and I missed it? But it just strikes me as a strange shift for them since branching pathways was ostensibly a big part of their draw.
Plus "Not than many" seams to mean some. The change I just replayed for was minor so not maybe not "impactful" but still notable and a choice I wanted to do differently once I finally saw how it turned out. And the cheat seems to indicate it bypasses forked paths your previous decisions have locked you into.
Are there still mutually exclusive endings then? If your choices don't matter does that mean it is basically just one final decision for those?
The decisions during the story impact two main things: the scenes unlocked in the galleries and the tone/flow of the story.
In my playthrough, I had all endings available to choose because I pursued every girl...lol, but I could see how different decisions earlier could potentially block out one or more of those girls' endings. I don't know if they do, because I didn't test it; but I see the potential for it to happen.
Generally, this story is like a road trip from New York to California... There are a lot of different paths, ways to get there, but all ultimately lead to the same general destination(s). The primary differences are the sites and scenery along the way.
Based on your comments, yes, some of those choices are impactful about the path you take to get to the end, how you get there, what you see, but not necessarily the overall destination. And similarly, there were a few sequences I didn't like, and went back to replay/change an earlier decision. A couple of those had to go back more than one chapter to "fix"...