Indeed. I just hope the Servers work again so I can complete the Mission, before Alexa gets poisoned.
But you still need to asses each story individually then come up with rules for that story. That’s the complicated part. Not the coding. Who wants to go through 30 story* missions and come up with rules for each when you can just leave them all with “must be competed in entirety and in order.”
Now I’m not saying they couldn’t have done it. Of course they could, they could also give us more animations and non reskin weapons too. 
*and what if the next guy doesn’t agree with what can and can not be skipped. Ask the boss? Take a vote?
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Same. Sometimes what is missed is just a little passage
I do think there need to be more ways to trigger the next stages in a mission story.
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I had this issue with all the games honestly, it’s why I switched to using the minimal assistance setting instead of off. I keep the challenge descriptions off so that’s where my “figuring it out” fun comes from. Those are a lot harder too, usually.
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probably the passionate team of software developers working on a free-form social stealth sandbox puzzler. 
apples and oranges. making mission stories uniformly possible to complete without having to rely on optional guidance seems more fundamental than additional reskins. not having the former actively hampers gameplay experience and i doubt io would want to actively frustrate players.
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I’m not questioning their passion. From everything we have seen most of them love to work there. No ones likes redoing things that don’t really need to be redone though. Especially when you’re going from a one size fits all approach to each one needing to be looked at. On top of that deadlines and resource limitations are both real issues.
Without them telling us we will never know if they knew the strictness might bother some of us and choose to leave it for whatever reason or if it slipped by their game testers. I tend to believe they tested the game with at least some testers not using hints, but I could be wrong.
no one is. i was being facetious. 
a few mission stories don’t ‘work’ - as far as i can tell - without guidance.
whether that’s intentional, a weird technical limitation or an oversight is moot - it is a frustrating experience, regardless, especially when the vast majority of mission stories in the entire trilogy do work perfectly well without guidance.
they could create additional lines of dialogue or new intel objects to ensure all mission stories work without having to have guidance on, but i imagine - in my utter laymen-ness - it would be much easier to unflag a few ancillary stages in mission stories that don’t have accompanying diegetic information available for players.
that doesn’t feel like a big ask to me, and it would help avoid frustrating dead ends on promising threads where players have no way to know how to proceed or, indeed, why they can’t. leaving that kind of experience in is the exact opposite of good game design, as far as i can tell.
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