Too long to reply to everything, but I do appreciate the discussion and the feedback! I'll note a couple of things:
- The idea of affecting the cooldown timer on the rituals seems like a good one to me. While from a lore perspective I had that in mind as an ironclad rule of magic to justify the restriction, I can explain it away in a story scene that growing lust reduces the timer. That reduces grind and plays into other systems. Lust can still do other stuff too, like unlocking scenes (that's planned already). So I think I will implement this idea and it helps a lot.
- We did consider having maid skills grow when doing activities, but we wanted to put more of an incentive on the instruct action, which I'd like to also use to introduce some little scenes or some other reward, but I don't know what those will be just yet.
- Love will definitely dictate how the romance scenes go, as a different sort of track to the sex.
- I do also plan to have obedience be the stat to unlock new ritual actions.
- Some of this will come together more as we introduce a few more systems; Delia's potions and the merchant's gifts and items will help with some of it, so maybe we'll boost stats a bit for now but reduce them again later to allow for other systems to help out.
Still chewing on some of this because I have a lot to think about. :)