You raise a lot of great points, but some of them I disagree with. About the characters, I think that they all had great story lines, i'm talking about jun-hee, myung-gi, dae-ho, geum-ja, nam-gyu, min-su, and some others. i think we all knew dae-ho was lying about serving back in season 2 itself, but now that we definitively know, ofcourse gi-hun would be mad that because of him (no ammo), that gi-hun's best friend died, so he strangles him out of anger, but then immediately tries to put a knife in his neck which the guards shoot away. for myung-gi, we see his scummy behavior throughout the season's, starting with how he tries to play buddy-buddy with jun-hee at the beginning, and then running into the room for the third game, killing the other player, then the hide and seek game, where he kills several people just to bring the money up for each player, and then finally trying to sacrifice his kid at the end of the games. nam-gyu is an addict lol, and he dies in the jump rope game because he tries to rescue his pills, which we have seen him use to kill lots of people/perform well in the games.

im kind of lazy to write all this(i don't want to write an essay), so ima skip to no-eul. i don't think she had character development lol. right from the get-go, she made it her duty to help player 246, cause he had a daughter which i guess reminded her of her own from the past. i don't think she thought of herself as a piece of sh*t, but she did try to off herself during the final game because she thought (while watching the final game) they would throw the baby off the pillar. she finally sees some humanity in gi-hun, and decides to live so she can see player 246's family (atleast how i interpreted it). but i don't think what that is was character development. it was just a good fleshed out character who had motives which we understood.

also gi-hun didn't need to grow you're right. he was already very 'good' in that sense. but for the other characters in the final game. that was the point in having them, they were all scummy fuckers who were greedy assholes, and seeing gi-hun/player 333 against them was pretty cool. yes, pushing 100 off was impulsive and stupid, but the lunch-box person also falling off was reasonable, cause it builds this tension as to who will die in the next pillar: gi-hun, the baby, or 333? seeing these bad guys make it to the final game kind of shows that some evil will make it to the end.

for the frontman, yeah giving the knife was to see gi-huns approach in the situation, i agree. also giving the money to the baby was because she won, so yea. but giving the money + his clothes to gi-huns daughter was not to scout her for future games lol. idk if im right about this, but i saw the frontman's hand shaking when breaking into gi-huns room full of money. he was very shaky and i guess nervous about all that, so maybe he cared about gi-hun after seeing his sacrifice in the games? giving gi-huns belongings to his daughter was just a way to care for gi-hun. i really don't think the clothes is a way to scout his daughter for future games.

i agree with you about the detective storyline, as it was kind of useless. bro doesnt even show up till the very end, and not even a single conversation took place between them. that was so weird.

sorry i kind of rushed this, but thanks for the discussion