I've seen Bo's work, so I appreciate Koda's reworking it lol.
You've probably seen the bugs and broken English, but I really doubt you've seen how it's all "disconnected" like Koda says. And that's what's relevant to this discussion because of three simple reasons:
*Making some safe assumptions based on what you've told us*
1. Bo hasn't asked Koda to do this, unlike the other two.
2. It's gonna take Koda a lot of time to do this, more than the other two.
3. "F7 feels disconnected" and "scenes don't flow well" are very ambiguous statements. It isn't clear what Koda means here and there's no clear-cut solution to these problems, unlike with the other two.
It's important to note though that Koda and I have similar tastes in terms of whether a porn game should have a meaningful game component. And in a lot of other things as it turns out.
You won't like what I have to say here, but I think that you're biased due to being a programmer and a friend to Koda. I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of people would like the 'game' aspect to take a backseat, and for the 'porn' aspect to be focused on the most. Putting 'game' on the same level as 'porn' is how we get absurd config settings like "Auto QTE Difficulty" and "Lite Progress Info" settings, and other completely unnecessary QoL stuff like toggleable Mouse Support...
The plot of 6.5F isn't braindead, though a bunch of characters are made dumber for the simple fact that many of the people who play this game are pretty dumb themselves and need things spelled out. Your specific criticism that everyone should know that the Swan and the Crow are partners felt a little dodgy just because I'm pretty sure there were heaps of hints at them actually being the exact same person; not being partners. But that's not really related to the point; I don't think 6.5F was braindead at all, just made more broadly appealing.
And now you're reaching. First off, if Koda feels like he has to make the plot dumb as hell for us to understand it, why does he think that we'll notice the lack of "connective tissue" for the story? You're just making my point here a̶n̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶k̶i̶n̶d̶a̶ ̶r̶u̶d̶e. If Koda doesn't think we'll be able to tell, then the only reason he's doing it is self-gratification,
which seems like a mighty bad reason to keep pushing 7F's release even further, especially since ToT is still primarily Bo's project.
Secondly, what is it that needs to be "spelled out"? That there's a connection between Swan and Crow? Apart from the fact that it should be painfully obvious even to Ethan and the 6.5F bros,
we are the player. We have outside information, meta knowledge, a player's perspective. What you're saying makes zero sense, anyone should've been aware that there's a deeper connection between Swan and Crow for a myriad of reasons, like for example the fact that they're women being added to ToT at the same time...
Thirdly, and this one makes me think you didn't think what I said through at all.
Your specific criticism that everyone should know that the Swan and the Crow are partners felt a little dodgy just because I'm pretty sure there were heaps of hints at them actually being the exact same person; not being partners.
This makes no sense either. Even if you choose to believe that Swan=Crow, my criticism still stands. The characters should be able to guess that there's a
deeper connection between Swan and Crow than what it seems at first. They have extremely similar nicknames and outfits, and are both operating in the same floor at the same time. The deeper connection might be that they're actually the same person if you like that theory. If they end up going with that, it only makes the characters even dumber for not realizing that they have the same body type, or voice, or that they've never seen them both in the same room at the same time, etc.