I fully agree with the rest of your post. But I don't think Toby decided to "reveal" anything relating to FRIEND or eggs. I think he "made up" some bullshit to make it seem chapter 5 had something going on.
IF you think about it, the multiple friends and eggs thing has been hinted at. The Shadow Mantle summoned copies of Friend during its fight. Spamton also had his Pipis, which it seems like now that he was being hunted. The YT guy who made the Woody Theory videos always caught flak for saying that he believes there are multiple Friends, but looks like he was right, but he was also saying that Friends are likely going to be a chapter 7 generic enemy.
People like to think Toby has a huge mental corkboard of interconnected story beats and mysteries. I did too, before chapter 5. But I think the truth is that he just makes it up as he goes along. I think the only real thing that he has figured out is the ending of Deltarune. Not how it gets there, not how it's developed or paced, just the ending.
I think he just has story beats on the corkboard, but he is winging it outside of those story beats, which is how you end up with uneven dialog, Characters between chapters forgetting what happened hours ago or the mood they were in, etc.
Ignoring schizotheories, how else do you explain Susie cheering up immediately after chapter 3's ending? How about in 5 when she got over Flowery dying immediately? Or most egregiously, her complete and utter lack of shits about what happened at the end of 4? Not a single moment of angst about it? Not one?
See above, I agree with you. But I think the Friend stuff was planned out for a while.
How can you look at Berdly and not see a character who is completely sidelined because he's the only character who has several different things that can happen to him? He can't even die because Toby isn't sure if he might need him at some point, so in the meantime he has to languish on a hospital bed in a coma while no one outside of Noelle and Susie ever comments on it. Why? Because every single character that ever mentions Berdly after chapter two has to have at least three separate lines of dialogue because three different things can happen to him.
Killing off characters has always been a problem in choice-based games. If a character can be removed from the game, you can bet that their role from that point forward is going to be minimal. This is due to the amount of development required to make branching stories. You can go back to the OG Walking Dead Season 1 from Telltale to see this. In Episode 1 you had the choice to save a guy or a chick. The character you saved barely did anything in episode 2. Then in episode 3, they both get killed at the same place in the story. Mass Effect had this problem with ME2, where major characters (Wrex, Ashleigh/Kaiden) that could die were barely in it, but since ME3 was the end of the series, they went and did SOME stuff with them. If a character did die before 3, their position in the story was replaced by a similar character (Wrex replaced by his brother, Thane replaced by the Salarian Commander, Tali you would deal with one of the other Quarians during her homeworld stuff). Hell, you can look at Dispatch from last year to see this in action. At the end of Episode 2 you have to choose to cut either Moistbattical from the team or the nigger assassin. The person you choose to keep barely has any character development unlike almost all the other characters, and the person you cut shows up at the end with no character development as a villain.
This issues won't be resolved until AI starts to be mass adopted for game development, then it will allow branching stories.
Look me in my chad Lancer avatar's eyes and tell me Toriel was always going to be asleep for the entirety of chapter 3. Tell me that Toby always planned for Undyne to be in it for only ten seconds before exiting the story entirely. No. He obviously planned to originally involve the two much more deeply into the story (or at least the chapter) but couldn't come up with a way to write them in, and so he practically gave up.
I was asking in Chapter 2, what was the point of having the Undertale characters in this? Chapter 3 did it further, then chapter 4, then chapter 5. You could replace all the UT characters with new OC do not steals and it would effect the story next to none, unless Sans and Gaster eventually do shit. I think Toby always planned to be using them as window dressing.
The area in chapter 4 with Gerson's library was at some point going to be a completely interconnected level with branching paths and that flowed into each other and the like. But it was too hard to make! So they gave. Up.
If Toby gives up so easily when it comes to the major characters and plot points in the actual story... Why would you trust him to write a satisfying mystery beyond just vagueposting? If he's willing to go back and add in more mysteryboxes, then why would you ever get invested into any theorizing?
So what else are we supposed to do? Go play the newest AAA slop? The theorizing is part of the fun of the whole thing. Yeah, Chapter 5 was shit and you can tell with all the flowers that the tranny devs got their claws deep into the direction of the story.
As people have said in this thread, no one aside from Tumblr people are talking about Chapter 5 because it moved the story 0. It vagueposted non-stop. And it was just a slog outside of a few highlight moments. There's a reason why the entire discourse around chapter 5 is the Onion-san, weird route, and pirate gaster stuff, it's cause the chapter went no where, so people are latching onto the little bit of advancement and shitposting we did get. Toby went in at 1 am last night and added like 10 lines of dialog and those 10 lines of dialog did more to advance the overall story and lore and years of theory than the entirety of chapter 5.
The big thing is just wait a few more years for AI to advance, then maybe we'll get grand story games where all the theorizing and mysteries pay off and aren't bogged down by lesbo romances and filler chapters.