I don't think the ending scene was needed. Asuna and Inoda's relationship at that point would have led to the soft reset because it would basically be Inoda jumping the gun and raping Asuna. We could have gone down the route of instant-loss, but then that would have created a jarring experience with how Part 1 made her overall resistant for a while just to instantly lose and not care about Kirito anymore. So to keep her in character, the soft reset ended up happening, which is something a lot of people have complained about.Well yeah we needed that ending scene. It was the peak of the game, the culmination of months of waiting and hours of playing. The game teased us with the glimpse of it without showing how it happened. Like. I still feel there was information about that day that was either kept from us, or just overlooked. Asuna spent the whole day with Inoda, going to different places, like a whole date day where he could have been pressuring her. The stormy night didn't need the drugged incense plot, Inoda could just have pressured her all day and then begged her in the night. But then the scene reveal came out completely different. I dunno, it started Part 2 off in a really bad place because Fujino was either hiding what happened, lying about it, or just didn't plan to tell us. It took a few updates before we got some of the clips, and even longer for us to find out the incense was fake and it really was just because Inoda was forceful and Asuna let him do it.
We could have probably skipped about 10 - 14 Asuna scenes from the earlier parts of Part 2, and the real "stormy night" would have probably been the FOG Treehouse scene. Because she would have been convinced it's not IRL and under the influence of in-game debuffs, but also consciously aware enough to know what's going on, it would have further built up to IRL. People complain about the IRL scenes that do happen to be recycles/rehashes of older scenes, and that's mainly the fault of how Part 1 ends, because it leads towards a soft reset.