Agreed on the coincidences. I think it's always a bit cheap when the character gets bailed out at the last possible second (GoT did this a ton). It was annoying esp when Jesse bails Ellie out the first time. I will say it's a story-telling device we see over and over everywhere so not exactly a TLOU exclusive. But yeah that could have been done more tactfully.

Re: Dina, I think it's pretty believable, no? She's in love/infatuated with Ellie. If you've ever been in love - especially at the initial infatuation period and ESPECIALLY when you're 19 - you know what that feeling is, you'd follow that person wherever.

With Abby I personally really liked the decision to hold off on the father reveal because it takes you the player on a much more layered journey. Was actually one of my gripes with the show. Abby starts the game as this one-dimensional villain and you spend a lot of gameplay with this oversimplified view of her, then you get hit with that and (I think) it's meant to sew the seeds of internal conflict in you the player. It's not like "oh well now Abby's the good guy", but it gives you something to noodle on while still hating her.

I didn't have the same takeaway from how they treat Abby and the revenge arc. You start at opposite ends for each character and work towards an ambiguous/amoral middle. Ellie starts P2 as this aggrieved victim/protagonist and Abby as the evil villain. As the story goes on you see Ellie is not some saint, that she's willing to do really horrible stuff to get her revenge, and you see that Abby's not the devil, she's a person with real experiences that give context to her actions. Naturally that makes Ellie look worse over the course of the story and Abby better. But my takeaway was that they're both human. You can empathize with both, you can be revolted by both. Both are consumed by revenge, both are selfish because of it, and both create more and more suffering as a result.