It's not bait. I think we're just not quite on the same page. Yes, the story requires progression. You have the talking about it, the exhibitionism, the groping, the blowjobs, the sex. It's a progression on the way of fulfilling the husband's fetish of seeing her have sex with someone else. The whole premise of the fetish. However, loss of control - the husband not being able to be an active participant in the room with her, being put in these situations where he has to watch her have sex with other people without working out if he's really okay with it beforehand like the Enzo situation - and the humilliation content, are not at all a prerequisite on this road to fulfilling the fetish. IMO the story has only exhibited these elements recently. The MC himself doesn't have a small dick or exhibited any predilections for humiliation before, and everything was very transparent and above board. How many more NTS stories can you name with such vanilla setups?
Yes, I know he's still getting off on it, and yes, it's fine for the story to ramp up the humiliation if that's what it's going for, but typically when it's going for that flavor of NTS, the setup is not nearly this vanilla. From my perspective, it feels like it started vanilla and has been getting progressively less so. Yet, lots of people are claiming the exact opposite, that it's actually getting more vanilla as it goes, and that it's part of this conspiratorial idea that it's because of vanilla people complaining about it, and not because it's simply what the dev was going for. I was just pushing back against that.