Well, Kyoko can't be cut out of the plot in any way. She was originally listed in the perks and plays an important part in the narrative. She is essentially indicated as a participant in one of the intended endings. I agree about Alice, but I think Fujino will now use Alice to make Kirito lose more of Asuna's trust and love. Kirito will help Alice in the game, will meet her in real life.
It's more like Kyouko has a little too many scenes that she probably doesn't really need. Kyouko was corrupted by Inoda pretty fast, so the only pivotal moment regarding Kyouko was just Inoda making her be nicer to Asuna. Kyouko has a masturbating scene where she's sexually frustrated, a shadow blowjob scene with Inoda, and a love hotel scene. The love hotel scene is just a hot scene, but probably was put there so that people could get an Asuna scene due to Inoda's imaginations.
Other content that could be cut are some of the dreams. The most notable is the one where Asuna is being taken by street thugs. Basically there's a decent chunk of CG content that wasn't needed to develop the story. In other words, this would have sped up development time and we would have reached this point in the story earlier. Maybe 2-3 months earlier.
My personal opinion though is that Fujino probably feels like they have to deliver something every update, so if they can't deliver meaningful Asuna content, then they'll try to make up for it elsewhere. The Kyouko love hotel sequence is an example of making up Asuna content elsewhere that's not really Asuna content. One of the easier ways to solve this is to stop releasing monthly, and to release in bigger chunks. It also prevents Fujino from writing each monthly update like an episodic update. It's honestly reasonable to just have the update stop abruptly in the middle of nowhere, but Fujino likes to to deliver. This ends up meaning there's always some kind of progression episodically per update. This ends up slowing down the pace, because Fujino spends time developing a "climax" to each update.
For example it's arguable that the camping event wasn't needed at all, but by creating the camping event, it gives Fujino a climatic point where Inoda bangs Asuna in the tent. The same goes with the recent battle update in the mines. I personally really liked that update, but it's set up to also end with a "bang". This ends up ruining a lot of pacing towards reaching the important bits of the overall story that Fujino is seemingly trying to pull off.
tl;dr Fujino just needs to update in bigger chunks (which might help with cutting some content too)