I can understand you, but don't forget, it's a matter of taste. And that aspect always becomes problematic.
I'll tell you a little more about what's behind the scenes. Somewhere in the middle of the development of the second chapter, we started getting great feedback (it was just after the Stukov scenes became more frequent and a lot of people wrote about it). So, at that point, we had our own players suggesting other options that could better unlock the game's potential. And we agreed with some of them. Let's say to replace Stukov with Samir Duran, aka Emil Narud. He really would have given us a lot more flexibility in terms of scene planning, and his character would have been interesting to us.
But at that time, there was already a lot to do, and just "shoving" it into the game was neither desirable nor possible. Because of this we were left to continue doing what we were doing.
There were other interesting suggestions and ideas, but we can't just turn the story around like that. After all, we have a script that we work on, we think about and plan for 2-3 updates ahead, and many scenes have already been drawn and so on.