Hi, AgentBoogeyman. Thank you for your comment, reading it was very enjoyable and I'm glad you liked the game so much.
About Luke, we actually plan on returning to that scene sometime soon and tinkering with it. Looking back I still appreciate it in a number of levels, mainly how it conveys a lot about Luke, but we're very aware that it really didn't work for a lot of readers. So, while I'm proud of it, I also recognize it's probably the single weakest point in the game for a lot of people.
Truth be told, when we wrote it we were under the impression that our readers would be a lot hornier, so it was (an extremely pleasant) surprise to see just how everyone got engaged with the more complex elements of the story! Back then we were trying to balance out a lot of things, like Asterion's story and the guests' and bits or the setting and world building, and in the end we put too many chips in the adult side of things. So, you know, lesson learned, we've adjusted our course since.
As a broader idea, we also want the SFW version of the story to be more SFW. Some scenes have censored nudity, which is just OK enough while straddling the line, but the narration is often too adult as well so we should change that too.
As an aside, we made this whole decision about how to tinker with Luke's NSFW scene based on all the survey responses we got. That was supremely useful to figure out how to improve things.
About Hinterlands IV... It actually has a few purposes in the story but they are not apparent.
On the basest of levels the Hinterlands sections pull the narration from the post-scarcity, healing community of the hotel down to the struggling lives of people who were somehow denied chances in life. They "reset the palate", in a way, and this applies to all Hinterlands segments.
Now, speaking specifically about Hinterlands IV, we had a very good reason to put it in but it's a bit arcane. Telling it would spoil the fun of playing detective. What I can say is that there's a subtle but revealing change that can trigger if a condition was met in Hinterlands III and that Hinterlands IV is placed in a very deliberate moment in the game.
And have fun in the spoiler threads! It should give you an idea of the important things that happen in the Ruthless Route, if you want to learn about them.