It’s your choice not to describe tools as ‘broken’ on principle. It is by no means universal; I can’t enforce my preference on you, but I can assure you as a design engineer (who designs tools and uses them) that designers complaining of tools broken-by-design is not uncommon.
But then, you’ll have to squint pretty hard to describe Fallen London as a tool in any conventional sense. "A tool to produce fun," but that’s more an exercise in semantics than anything else. In Fallen London’s case, there are at least-- in most cases-- the ability to undo most things. If you make a misstep grinding survivor of the Affair of the Box, for instance, you can undo that. You can’t undo it instantly as with a conventional save and restore, but you can get back to where you were before. Likewise, a recent mis-click got me Plotting Against the Masters, which I emphatically Do Not Want, but I’m pretty sure if I’m patient I can undo that.
Then there are the cases of true permanence, or permanence up to an expenditure of cash. In some cases, it seemed to me as though what the expenditure of cash got me was the opportunity to make a permanent choice that was not well advertised at all. (It was fate locked and involved the Regretful Soldier. It was over so fast I didn’t even realize what had happened, so I don’t have clear memories of it.) Those are the ones that grind directly against my sense of what is fun. I don’t know if I’m in a majority or a minority on that, but I do know from reading the forums that I’m not alone.
While I’m giving feedback, though, in order not to be wholly negative, I do (so far) like the content of the new story line… such that I’ve been able to experience it in the minefield of getting branches turned off and dead-ended. The irritation factor is in direct proportion to my interest in the content. (And so again, to belabor the obvious-to-me, it surprises me that it is so easy to get locked out of content that you should be proud to have people widely experience.) It’s also nice, but certainly not necessary, that there are so many 0-move actions in that story line.
And finally, as a concrete suggestion on notions of permanence, perhaps it’s worth considering some extremely slow-accumulating resource that can be traded in to undo certain stories or results. It already takes four weeks to get a Trade Secret; perhaps an exchange of four Trade Secrets might be a reasonable mechanism. It’s slaved to the clock, so it’s immune to grinding. Three resets a year hardly seems excessive. And at a pure cash value of 450 echoes or 600 stats change points, I doubt they’d be spent lightly except by people at the top of the POSI/cash pyramid, anyway.