I agreed with you up until the examples~ ^^;
In G-Senjou I liked the side routes. Sure, they pretty much abandoned all connection with the main story, but that doesn’t matter to me, because the side routes had their own stories that were great. It’s nice to see how everything could end up, and at the end of the VN, I felt like the memories of the side routes came back to impact me during the final scenes.
As for Litbus I felt that the side routes were it’s downfall. Just stepping stones on the way to the ending. It didn’t make me care for characters more than before I read the VN (it actually made me dislike most of them) and the heroines were tossed aside as an afterthought in Refrain. Refrain probably wouldn’t have been as good without the side routes, but with the way it was done, the side routes actually made me think less of it overall.
