Firstly, I find it very good that instead of the usual ranting in this forum, you are actually expressing positive critics and solution proposals. However, your post is too long to read in detail, really.
It's a bit of an essay, yes, but given the typical game format on the boards I figured people might be more willing to have a longer read. Besides, I tend to take notes on truly exceptional games and post them all at once as feedback once I've reached a relative state of completion, rather than run through it incrementally and waste time and space as if the medium is Discord or IRC. =)
Plus there's a TL/DR summary which was even written to be TODO and release note friendly. ;-)
I did notice I forgot to mention something, though. I would have loved a meta joke about fitting the shovel in the MC's backpack, since it's very early on in the Diane story.
Diane (smiling): "Did you bring the shovel?"
MC (cheerful): "Yes, here it is!"
Diane (suspicious): "..."
Diane (laughing): "MC, how in the world did you fit that in your backpack?"
MC (confused): "I... don't know?"
If you have bugs, you should attach a savegame here so that people can reproduce and check.
...
I thought I already fixed that Dexter bug with my mod. Again, please attach a savegame if possible.
Can do!
Just to clarify, Dexter's book can be collected from his locker only
after the overdue books quest is complete.
1) Quicksave 4 has all the books turned in. Note that it is not possible to collect the book from Dexter's locker.
2) Quicksave 5 is from a week later, with a couple more stories progressed. Note that it is now possible to collect the book again.
It's worth noting that there was a space conflict between Roxxy's shower scene and the Martinezes, which made collecting Martinez's book impossible because the MC had to train charisma to void the Roxxy scene before he was able to collect the Martinez book. I think that is unlikely to affect much, but then again, I was pretty much convinced it wasn't NTMod to blame. (I haven't run in debug mode, decompiled the game, or extracted any of the images since I don't like to do that until I've finished a relatively complete game without a gallery feature and want to see what possible images or scenes I've missed.)