I appreciate the feedback and I can certainly understand why it may come across that way, especially for a new player (all of the Marla/Lani interactions are new as of 2.9). Since this is an open-ish sandbox world, I'm not structuring the releases of the romance routes in a traditional sequence (or even a sequence that makes a lot of sense). Essentially, the only current route in the game is the polyamorous route (not to be confused with the harem route) and the beginning of Lani's individual route, so it's really sort of shoe-horned in there without any options for the player to pick and choose (since most choices would simply lead to nothing, I've omitted them in this version). This was done only because I was doing a lot of rendering in Marla's room in this most recent update, so I went ahead and did as much 'Marla's room' content as I could in the time I had. I know it seems strange for me to say it, but the current route is actually something that's not intended to be the primary route for most players in their initial playthrough of the game (I expect that most players will veer towards the Lani individual route when the options are made available). Couple that with having no real content for Marla's individual route other than the initial interactions and you have some scenes that may seem out of place.
As with a lot of these types of games, the final intended product will allow the player to choose their partner(s) and avoid the characters that they have no particular interest in, though finishing a route with one character will unlock additional options with that and other characters, so there will be incentives for the player to follow all of the routes eventually.