My first OIALT experience was similar to yours, which inspired me to create this mod. And yeah, you're bringing up a major problem: The mod is designed for first time players, but who starts looking for mods when they haven't even tried the game yet? I'm working on making more of these mods, so that even if you learned about Causality too late with one AVN, there's still Causality mods for other AVNs that you benefit from going forward. But until then, I kinda rely on word-of-mouth recommendations.
Reading your anecdote makes me feel validated about my work, thank you for writing it!