Again right on the nail, my friend: nowadays, more and more, visual novels have a really lazy or downright bad conception regarding choices. Few, randomly scattered, and even worse, choices with totally illogical results that nonsensically spit you into a neutral, bad or simply disconcerting route. That’s another one of the things I want to “correct” with “And now, time to study”. It’s true that an author’s subjectivity plays inevitably a big role in the design of choices, but even being so, I observe a growing and really worrying laziness and lack of true depth in most cases. The richness of a well designed web of choices is another key to have a truly fulfilling experience with a visual novel. This helps to avoid that sense of lack of freedom you talk about, when you mention the issue of “having to take exactly the specific path” that the author envisioned in their mind. This is yet another sample of the lack of creativity that, more and more, players stumble upon out there: a good visual novel should be VERSATILE, it should give some level of freedom and the possibility of reaching a good route following more than just one strict path. Again, something I’m trying to achieve in “And now, time to study”.
Once more, I mention your own words: a player should feel truly rewarded when making a series of good (or correct) choices which lead them to a good ending… not disconcerted and asking themselves: “what the heck?!”. And this, as an author, means keeping yourself away from two extremes: either making choices ridiculously easy (or meaningless whatsoever), or making them terribly hard (or downright nonsensical).
But of course, all this demands a thorough and long work… something that less and less people (and companies) feel bothered to go through nowadays. As anything else in the business scenario and life itself, they want the greatest profit with the minimum effort, and this ends up showing in the generally poor quality of the most recent visual novels. Katawa Shoujo, for example, was able to avoid this detrimental tendency because it was nourished with the enthusiasm of fan creators instead of the cold business of companies, and so, it flourished in an excellent visual novel. That’s one of the most important models I want to follow for “And now, time to study”.
And yeah, of course, I know that Fruit of Grisaia’s anime isn’t at all a good reference for the game (which happens in many other examples). I didn’t exactly play the VN, but I also watched some gameplays of a certain youtuber which gave me a rough idea of its structure as a game. Even when the lack of choices (for whatever reason) doesn’t exactly answer my tastes, I’m aware that the story is certainly worth enough as inspiration material at least.
Well, again a wall of text (this really shows my writer's soul), but I hope to have made myself more or less clear. With all this in mind, I’ll keep trying my best regarding my own visual novels. Cheers!