Well, I understand where this is coming from, but it is a little disappointing, yet not for the reasons you may think. Let me try to explain.
An AVN is defined by two things mainly. The +18 and the story. Good AVNs have a good balance of both, it's not about shifting from one to the other. Sex is a natural part of our lives, sexuality shouldn't be avoided or treated as taboo, we shouldn't feel ashamed for it. Romance feels more realistic when there's a healthy sexual aspect of communication between the partners after all.
So it's disappointing that you decided to completely shirk away from writing erotica just because you didn't want to be considered "smut". It may look like they're the same, but the context and understanding of the work is very different. You could very well aspire to write something like 50 SOG, or become a novelist like Nora Roberts who often included one or a couple of sex scenes in her books, yet they never got called "smut reading" because that wasn't the focus. It was always complementary. They help normalize sex and sexuality, so hearing you're following the opposite path is disheartening, because you're falling prey of the same fallacy that's causing so much harm to the AVN industry lately.
Still, if this is what you really want to do, I wish you luck. I don't think I'll be reading your book, since I prefer interactive stories (hence why I'm interested in VNs to begin with), but I really hope you achieve your dreams. Godspeed