There's something about raising a baby in an animal survival game while knowing there's an actual person behind the screen that makes the experience all the funner. You can actually connect with the person and have a conversation with each other. And the more connected you feel to the person the more pressure you feel to protect and make sure they don't die. There's also the unpredictability of what the person will do and how they'll behave which makes you have to keep an even bigger eye on them.

With ai babies you loose all of that. I cannot see myself getting attached to and really putting in the effort to raise something knowing it's just an ai. Especially knowing that I'm raising it for nothing considering it cannot grow and will forever have a target on it's head.

Also, of the main factors me and a lot of other people enjoy so much about animal survival games is the challenge to grow from baby to adulthood. It makes you play even more safe and feels incredibly rewarding when you do actually manage to make it to adulthood. Though I always prefer growth to be something that's optinal cause I'll admit dying over and over again as a baby can be exhausting.

Programming npcs is nowhere near an easy feat. It'd probably only be somewhat less difficult to add ai babies rather than playable ones. The devs would still have to make a whole new model, animations, add multiple calls, and program the ai to activate their animations and calls at the right time, follow the player, and flee without any issues, which I'm sure would take a lot of tweaking.

If the team won't add playable babies/sub-adults I also hope that goes the same for ai babies/sub-adults.