Thank you for playing and for your honest feedbacks! ^-^
About the countdown, I think you have a point, at least to some extent, but I'd like to explain a bit more about why we chose to add it. There were mainly two reasons behind that.
Narratively, we wanted to create the feeling of a hotline where lots of calls are coming in and you have to pick them up quickly, keeping the line open whenever possible.
Mechanically, I wanted to create some pressure and encourage players to make quicker decisions. There are several games that combine QTE with dialogue choices specifically to prevent players from carefully analyzing every option. In the first iteration, the timer was much shorter, but I didn't take into account that questions had various length and that players have different reading speeds. That's why I decided to increase the timer to accomadate everyone.
I agree that the game would still be fully playable without the countdown, but it would change the experience, at least to some extent. Anyway, I found your perspective interesting! And sorry for the long answer lol. I hope you still find our game enjoyable! ^^