1. I'm improving on generating those assets every day, hopefully you will not notice in future games!
2. The part with the mall is just for flavor, to reflect / react on what you did. You'll get a different dialog if your relation is different.
3. I see what you're saying, I also think having multiple paths is cool. Difficult for a day-based game because you need to keep up with the pace of the game and this furthers complicates things (What if you accidentally mixed the two paths) but for other games it might be cooler.