haha yeah i had a few people recommend I swap to renpy. Unity kept giving me issues and deleting my progress so I just bit the bullet and swapped. As for saves, it won't port your save from unity, but it should carry over from each renpy version (I think. I'm still learning renpy).
I asked about the npc thing a while back in my discord. This game takes place in the same setting as the rest of my art and there are no males there, just women and futas. I asked if people would prefer seeing a placeholder character like what we have now, or a fully rendered futa character. The responses were pretty even so I went with the greyed character to appeal to more people while still keeping it in my lore boundaries.