@bahamut2195 Your opinion is fine, and I responded to your post because it seems like a reasonable position that many people share to some extent. The major grain of salt I'm taking your comments with isn't naivete, but the fact that you've played the game enough to make saves for every mistress/variation/etc. The narrative is designed around an organic playthrough (or perhaps a few); playing enough to essentially peek behind the curtain (as you have) will inevitably ruin some of the magic in a way we might not be able to fully accommodate.
Anyway, a more high-risk/stakes approach isn't a bad idea or bad thing to want, but I did want to clarify that it simply isn't the intended design for 1-5F (Cobra, for all her pizzazz, is ultimately just the end of the tutorial).
Because we're taking more time with them and putting more thought into their initial design, higher floors can be more severe: having Bad Ends in addition to the core "romance"/sub/slave progression (similar to Khulan) for players who decide to be especially foolish or negligently submissive.
Hopefully this mix will be the best of both worlds, and I'm sure you understand why it's much easier to do this with characters designed that way from the ground up than those being added to retroactively.
I prefer for Submission to give rewards, actually. I think it makes the story more organic by offsetting the MC's supposed reluctance and gives some incentive for people neutral about a character to try their expansion or whatnot (but not so much that they feel forced, hopefully).
On the other hand, while I'm not kink-opposed to some sort of "death-by-a-thousand-cuts"-esque debuff stacking on the MC as he runs around submitting to everyone until he's utterly helpless, it seems very difficult to implement without a lot of tedious gameplay. If you have a particular idea or implementation suggestion, though, feel free to share.
Local drawbacks (eg. Yvonne's Kick / Bootsniff) are naturally much easier and will continue to appear.
For what it's worth, Bo is much more dichotomous about designing "bad" situations for when you want to fap masochistically and "good" situations for when you want to play hero, while I try much harder to merge and intertwine them. My issue with that approach (in general, not his specifically) is that it often feels contrived to me, so neither outcome feels convincing. Conversely, one could argue that my style muddies the waters in a way that makes everything less meaningful.
That said, the fundamental motivation for choosing a mistress (or mistresses) should be liking them and wanting to be dominated by them. The "point" of Eliza is seeing yourself get seduced/tamed to the point where you'll give up your humanity and become a bondage pet just to be near her. If being her pet doesn't interest you, then indeed there should be no meaningful difference (to you) between a save where you submitted to her and one where you didn't.
Again, I can see how choices seem "hollow" because things are incomplete (and the exact stopping points may be especially tantalizing; we-were-on-the-verge-of-greatness.jpg, etc.), but ultimately I think the arbitrariness of choices makes them fuller, not emptier. I don't want people submitting to Scarlett exclusively for a free Volcano Ash. I want them to want to be her puppy (and if they don't, no hard feelings; move to next floor).
@zazzaro I think about most criticism that gets written (taking some more to heart than others, of course) and have personal dissatisfactions with each release that are much harsher than anything I ever see posted. If I found this criticism vacuous or planned to disregard it entirely, I wouldn't have replied.