Sad to hear that. Sandbox + quest log mechanism is good.
While there are games implementing that well, there are even more so that don't.
(And there are stories benefitting from that technique, while others really don't.)
With all of them (that I know of), you have either no time frame though, or you have a time limit in which to finish the game.
So either it is of no consequence if you finish the game on day 11 or day 311, or you need that WT to not have a game over after spending too much time managing your quests. A large part of the game becomes meta that way as you play against the game's hurdles.
WVM has a sports event schedule in the background. And while we know the sexy part has priority, we know that there will be matches, girls' birthdays, and so on. So in case (and I highly expect that to happen) BD uses them in Ethans encounters and the story he has planned, doing this on your own schedule would either conflict with the schedule of BD's story, or he would have to sewer the events from it, practically doing separate flows, one for Ethan and one for the world around him, making the story kind of bland .
But why do the extra work without the storyline benefiting from it? Why adding the possibility to get out of sync when this is all about wholesomeness?
Edit:
In case you meant this in a way to just cut out downtime - so the game still going its own way and you just jumping to events when it gets interesting - well we didn't have that much downtime until now - and BD already said that starting with the next update the game will start to kind of summarize and only point out special encounters. So no more 7 parts for one day, but one update for the next 5 days. So here too - no need to add extra work/mechanics to achieve this in the story.
