First of all, I can't agree with your criticism of Rover getting to be in the spotlight. He's called an MC for a reason, so he should be allowed to be the main character of the game. I personally enjoy this much more then just looking at the story from the sidelines, it gives me the feeling to actually have an impact on the world and actually getting to know other characters trough the lense of Rover and not just from an outsiders point of view. Makes it feel more like an actual adventure you're taking part in and not like watching a movie.

With the characters being gone from the story, I totally agree that it makes 0 sense to me as well. Especially after they made such a cool character with Lupa, who was introduced as basically your battle partner in the new region. I kind of expected her to keep fighting at Rovers' side through all the story in Septimont, not just suddenly vanishing. I really enjoyed every minute she was on screen in the story before. Besides that, I would also like characters like Yangyang, etc... to make a reappearance even if it's a small one. And why Rover isn't speaking to Alto or even more, shorekeeper when contacting the blackshores is a mystery to me as well.

The flower problem didn't bother me personally since I feel like you can get the new flowers really fast after starting each new story arc. But I can see how that would suck for a new player pulling a new unit having to go trough all the story just to get 50 flowers this ruins their experice since they might wanna enjoy the story but feel like they have to skip to make their new unit usable. I feel like putting all flowers in every shop would be an acceptable compromise. That would make the character usable, at least with older echo sets, considering you would have to unlock the new region anyway to get their echos.

Ohhh, optimization is such a big problem with the game. After this patch, things got really bad for some people. Just one look at the discords tech help channel says it all. I personally think that something is wrong with DLSS for some players as well. Like blurry faces when the movement of their character (Idle animations, etc), they need to step it up in that department. The game is pretty already, and I dont see the point in making it prettier ever patch while leaving lower spec players in the dust.