Assumptions were made based on the extremely adversarial tone of both of your posts.
To progress you need to look at the hints in the menu. Sometimes the hints in the quick hint menu are more or less descriptive than the ones in the main menu and the individual girls' dossier pages. If your complaint is specifically about the need to fill up an invisible "get to know you better" gauge when they really have nothing to say, then I would agree that is a flaw in the tuning. However, if you've been trying to focus on one character, that's probably the major chokepoint you're hitting. Talk to everyone a little bit until they have the hint 'I need to X with Y first' at which point you can stop talking to them. Eventually you'll run out of people who don't have a hint like that and simply talking to the right person will set off a cascade of new event flags as long as you do them in the order of characters they're listed as depending on.
Be sure to also check the main menu for hints about progressing the main plot as sometimes you will need the world to be in a certain state to be able to activate new pending events. You can't deal with a serial killer when there haven't been any killings.
It's possible to get a little stuck. It's not perfect. Sometimes events will happen when you least expect it simply by entering a location even without a hint telling you its there.
Again I would agree that the hinting needs refinement.
I hope you can figure out the rhythm and enjoy the plot as it unfolds. But if you can't then... that's unfortunate. But maybe take a breath and remember civility if you don't want to fight in a war it seems to everyone else like you just started.
Incidentally, after getting to know everyone in the hearth is where I would say the most interesting part is. It's where all the gears start meshing... or grinding as they sometimes do.