I'm glad you decided to go with the normal VN route, I much prefer those to sandboxes. I mean, I personally don't mind the size, as long it's properly downloadable(i.e. not on Mega), could be 100GB for all I care, though that would be problematic for you, obviously, and your mobile users will be screaming. So do what you have to do(except cutting stuff).
In regards to outfit notifications, yes there were for the same ones(I was doing thorough rollbacking to confirm). I remember there were 2 cases, one of them I believe was during Riley and Cassie at your home scene, so there were 3 total lines of text, don't recall the other occurrence.
I forgot to ask; with the full course students arriving in the following week, will they be included in the story?
Lastly, are names for saves something people have been asking for? For me personally it's quite annoying. Just extra unnecessary clicks. I can already see what scene it is so I don't see what the point of naming saves would be. Might be just me though.