[Generic Spoilers Included In Below Response]
heya, thanks for the lengthy post. I'll admit that i'm always intimidated to try and reply to these so I'll give it a go.
The balance of Zack was tough in the beginning (although i dont like the beginning of the game and it needs work but this is just my pre-alpha rough draft of the story so far). I wanted Zack to be somewhat typical because if i hit everyone with his realism right off the bat, i figured I'd lose people. People are used to the adult/NSFW genre being porny and I wanted to do a fakeout at the beginning and give people a sense that that was the case here. However, trying to balance that with the slow introduction of something deeper here was kinda challenging to me. I basically wanted an adult game that people would eventually have to take seriously as something much deeper that just chose the adult genre because there's no limits on what you can discuss and portray sexually.
Braden's character is a bit tougher to crack and will continue to be in the final chapter. While some could look at him as the str8 boy going gay, it's much more complicated than that and he wrestles with that in a completely different way than zack does. I figured the community was attack him, in fact there's one sub-community of a particular tuber that does relentlessly attack him. But I wanted Braden to stand as the complete antithesis to people who demand that someone admit they're gay when they're authentically not. This story is very much making the case that labels, regardless of how many we try and make, will still be limiting to people. It's very much a journey of finding yourself regardless of what categories people want to place you in or force you to admit to being.
In terms of your criticism, I agree. the beginning is very much what adult games were at the time it started (2017). They were grind and state based so I started there given that I had no experience. Eventually I think i found my voice and said fuck the genre i'm doing my own thing and I think that paid off. I want to reconstruct the beginning as well as update the quality of writing since I got quite a bit of experience with that over the past few years.
Also, the rock scene is only in the respect route.
I agree with most of your suggestions and hopefully i can connect some of those dots when i got back and try and polish some of this. This is very much just a public rough draft of my story