I actually don't know how the route was received in general, to me it was an awful route that completely missed the branching opportunities already in place.
My theory is that the dev did not want to add stuff to the old content since it would require sone refactoring of the code to bring it up to s5 standards, so we got a branching from there instead.
Overall this lead to a complete disconnection and no buildup, since the story was so progressed that a slow buildup would throw off the pace and the NTR "fans" waited quite a while already.
Having said that the quality of the story is the usual slop, and I say this as a great fan of watersports.
All relationships between characters are forgotten and lost to give space to the usual boring two pumps chump corruption.
Bringing back the old split personality that we meet at the beginning and having MC face the facts with a new "ally" would have been a nice touch.
Yeah, that's about how it feels. The funny thing is that now Uber, if I understand everything correctly, has decided to change the plan again and abandon the separate NTR route and reintroduce it back into the narrative as an offshoot of the main route. Very strange behavior that takes time, effort and resources.
About the route perception - as Count Morado wrote to me, Uber had the biggest increase in subscribers and revenue during the NTR update. But I personally attribute this not to the fact that the NTR route was very high quality and interesting, but simply the influx of NTR fans. It is clear that when you work for a non-NTR audience, the numbers will not be the same as when you enter a new audience with a separate route. From a business point of view, it seems to be a good option, but from the players' point of view, both camps lose. Vanilla fans get less vanilla content, NTR fans get less (and in this case about 0) NTR content. In my opinion, it is much more logical to complete the main route and fully engaged in NTR (demand for it like there is and very even good). And pulling both camps without expanding the team to speed up the process is not a good idea. But this is my opinion as a player.
Well, about the quality of the content of the NTR route many have already expressed and evaluated the idea of obtaining electrolytes from urine a huge number of different epithets
I share your fear, this is why I am not opening my wallet until I see the finished product, I currently do not trust the dev to bring a decent story in the main route and for him to be able to deliver on his promises (since there is no s6 planned at all).
About the art, some AI animations were not that great, especially in the classroom, but that can be overlooked.
In my opinion, AI animations would have been better used for showcases (on Steam, but after rejection - on itch.io), and removed from the game. All of them are crooked, it's impossible to loop them normally (although with normal animations for some reason there are problems - they are twitchy, or the problem is on my side). AI art in general became much better, but lacks attention to detail. I noticed that Uber fixed some of Mary's faces in 1.0.35, but the faces of other characters still have the same problems. I won't say anything about the story part because of spoilers, but in my opinion there are problems with logic in some places.