Did we really need that Nefer section?

I actually like Nefer's design and her personality. What I don't like is that these guys keep force feeding her into the story when she really doesn't have any reason to be there. In this case, suddenly there's a spy in the camp and they need to go after him. Only it turned out, he wasn't really a spy but a stooge in order to waste the gang's time. Which also meant it wasted our time doing any of it. If the whole thing was 4 hours long, I think it'd be fine to have filler like this in it. But this thing is 7+ hours long. We don't need extraneous segments. It also makes it feel like the devs just really love their Nefer character so they felt a need to insert her into her own section of the story even when it doesn't enrich it at all. I think it would have been better to just have a small cutscene of them going "How come it seems like they know all our moves before we make them? There must be a spy!" "I felt the same way so we looked and did in fact find some unsavory individuals in the camp." "Who are they working for?" "That's just it. We went to their meetup point when they said it'd be and no one showed. Could they have been spooked?" And then Scaramouche who figured it out could still figure it out, "Wait, a decoy that's not really a decoy? I have a feeling I know who's behind it then." This version should only take 2 minutes?

Of course the other major part of this section was the changing of the Archon Quest title from the Nod-Krai glitchy one into the fabled "Truth Amongst the Pages of Purana." This title was actually the original name for the Act V part of the old Sumeru Archon Quest from a few years ago. It was changed because the story focus was changed to focus on releasing Scaramouche as a playable character. Otherwise back then we would already have done this stuff and before Nefer or Nod-Krai were even released. Dottore would still be the enemy since that was actually where the story seemed to be going back then until they switched it up for Scaramouche. The thing is players thought this was some big plan by the devs and they'd had it set up this whole time that Sumeru would be incomplete and then we'd go through years of other stuff before getting Nod-Krai, filling in the gaps with the Sumeru plot in the Nod-Krai story (the Nefer and Dottore stuff) and then coming back now. Naturally this is easily disproven. Nod-Krai was originally just a small piece of the nation of Snezhnaya. We were supposed to get that last year but instead they went with this filler stuff and Snezhnaya will be coming in August of this year. Since Nod-Krai or whatever it would have originally been called is related to Snezhnaya and Snezhnaya references to Russia, there's no way it would have had a story related to Sumeru aka Persia. On top of that, we hadn't heard a peep until Nod-Krai. The story was over and done with. What this really is is the devs preying on nostalgia since people were confused why the title was changed back then and some had been holding out hope that it would magically come back. It's the same as Final Fantasy VII. For year players wanted a remake and for years Square Enix said they were never going to make one. And now look. We're already waiting on the last part of the remake. The reason being, money talks.

However now that we're done with this section, we're back in the game. There's going to more action, more real story, some major developments, etc.