I have not said it was a waste as a principle. I said if one intends to skip contracts in order to pursuit a more fluid story progression pace, then cheating with mods, had a similar overall effect. Similar does not mean absolutely equal. Of course the new free roaming is a superior version of cheating with mods, more intuitive, more fluid and without the risk of damaging the save file progress.
But, due to the overall similarity between, I believe the development time, would've been better spent on story progression content and that is all.
Also, another thing that worries me, is that now he'll have to code in two different fronts (default story and free roaming).
Which could be very fast or not, depending on how he write the code template structure.
We'll see how the pace will be for the next content drop, and if free roaming may or not place an impact on it. Besides the already spent time of work put into it.
Firstly, no offense but regardless whether saying it as a principle or not, you've been pretty much implying in both of your previous 2 posts that he "really should have focused on the VN aspects of the game rather than the contracts."
Only way for that to happen would have been for him to completely abandon all the actual gameplay aspects and just solely focus on the VN mode (and that's not happening, given he's found the suitable system for his contracts).
Secondly, I think you're getting yourself a little bit confused here with the terminology.
The game is split into 3 following segments:
1) Main Story & Main Events (as the name says, the events in those headers in "Journal")
2) Girls' lewd/free-roam events (a.k.a. Luna/Gracie/Isabel/(and in the future) Cordia events)
3) Contracts (a.k.a. Wilfred's Contracts) though this gameplay system is also implemented to Main Story/Main Events with the missions
Free-roam are the girls' lewd events content (where MC roams around the DeLuca mansion going around the rooms to access these girls' events). It is not what you're referring to (which I'm assuming are contracts).
Not sure what you mean exactly when you're referring to "new free roaming is a superior version of cheating with mods, more intuitive, more fluid and without the risk of damaging the save file progress" but ever since v0.07 released last year, this thread has had many people coming to the thread with the posts
"I can't access the Ombra mission. I used mods."
"Can't begin the Ombra mission, can't talk to Wilfred at all. I used cheat before."
Now you may not have experienced the issue while using the cheats/mods, but several people (stopped counting when numbers rose and rose but at least 10+ people, even close to 20 maybe) have experienced their saves being screwed over by using cheat mods.
So that risk is always there (whether it's to lesser or to greater degree). If people still wish to use cheat/mods to jump over the contracts, then that's their decision, but they also gotta deal with possible consequence of their saves being corrupted.
Lastly, it's not like Hopes said every single update will have Wilfred's Contracts in it (and no, next update will not have Wilfred's contracts content).
Also, Hopes intended for the gameplay system in Wilfred's contracts to naturally transition to the main story, and he did that; first time was the Ombra mission, and then we had the Gracie Team missions against the Bonanzo Family in v0.08.
As someone who didn't really like the first version of Wilfred's Contracts of the game, I'm actually quite satisfied with how everything turned out.
To further reiterate, as Carta said previously, while it's different from VN aspect, it's still content.
Just not the content you (or people who only want the VN part) expect/want.
So even if you dislike it for possibly eating up development time for VN aspects of it (though I highly doubt it would as much as it did for v0.07 development), it is what it is.
Full experience is his full vision of the game, and that will always come as priority (which yes, includes the contracts system).
