The game being unforgiving is intentional, for a few reasons.
Once someone's cooled off toward you, winning them back is meant to be genuinely hard, same as it would be in real life. That's the dynamic I wanted to capture.
It's also free to play, but I'm giving a real prize to whoever tops the board each month, so the difficulty has to hold up.
And the "hard to win someone over" part comes from how I write. My long-form stories on Patreon work the same way. I've got characters who chase one guy for twenty years and still don't get what they want.