Oh my god, I didn't expect such quick reply, I'm glad you took criticism so well! I was half expecting to get my comment deleted, so that’s a relief
From my perspective, I think you *could* get away with pleasing everyone about the bar display with some smart placement. Right now, the bars are all completely separate, so are buttons and some of the settings, taking up a lot of space, if you could combine them on their own section, maybe with submenus (and here is where i gave up trying to describe what i was thinking, I'm an artist, not a writer, so i made a small mock-up, i really do hope this is not overstepping hahah). Even if they're smaller, they would display all of the relevant information, and you can still notify the player with a pop-up on-screen every time they change just to be sure all of the bar changes sink in.
And yes, your production consultant is right, scope creep is completely real, sadly. Maybe you don’t have to redesign *all* of the UI? The programming is all there, after all, maybe you can still use it, but make it feel less obtrusive to the story at hand? Making it a bit smaller, maybe chatbox sized, with all of the buttons coming out of it, while the main section of the screen is still dedicated to displaying stuff.
It really depends on how far the poor artist and you as the writer would be going, but, a few examples off the top of my head for making the cases -- that I'm assuming are the bulk of the story, so they should be the most engaging part -- more interesting would be:
Different backgrounds for different locations (never mind if you reuse them once or twice to make them less of a one-off investment)
Little icons for the case objects (the drug from the demo)
Camera movement for game feel ( zooming in when the suspect starts to run, shaking the camera when maybe the dogs bark and Watson gets spooked, a bit of movement does *lots* of heavy lifting, hell, maybe even when Sherlock's health goes down as nice visual feedback)
If we're going overboard, maybe having dialogue sections when Sherlock talks to someone to break up the gameplay, you wouldn't even need another full sprite if the character spoken to is minor enough, many visual novels get away with having someone just talk without sprite, the arcana comes to mind. If we're going full on crazy, even an end-of-case illustration like the Sherlock on the floor one.
Sorry for the wall of text, I'm a game design student and doing an internship with a company who's main game is a visual novel, this is all I've thinking about for the past two and a half months ahahah. You are completely allowed to disregard everything in this message if I’ve gone a little bit overboard myself, and I apologise in advance.
Thank you for replying!
PD: i also did the sub-menus and a comparison of space taken, but apparently itch.io only lets me post one image at once, so I'm posting the most relevant one, hope this works 