I can understand where the notion of RD being "thrice bigger" Ever17 comes from. What I don't understand, is the apparent high regard for ZE series (which ARE retardified E17 carbon copies - apparent gimmicky Saw/B-movie visual style nonwithstanding - interspersed with utterly irrelevant to anything story-related CrimsonRoom-like minigames, through and through) that I sort of pick up from your post, in the context of the apparent bashing of RD.
I mean, the B route of RD, the one, the pace of which you so disliked (despite the second half of D, not to mention the entirety of Xtend Episode, being
much slower, due to all the RAM-fuckery), had a definite twist to it, a twist, that neither of the Infinity games, nor I/O, nor 999/VLR, nor PunchLine, had. And Nakazawa's I/O itself, again, featured a very definite twist of itself, which didn't have anything, at all, in common with, again, anything aforementioned. That's some creativity, don't you think? Did VLR have very much of such creativity? Well, other than reusing some of E17's twists in a particularly retarded manner (*cough* mirror twist *cough*) and making every character a badly modelled and rendered slapstick-comedy-level-assclown, well, it did feature some semblance of a, sort of, futuristic post-apocalyptic setting to it. Hard to tell, really, when the whole thing is, like, shown in a couple of glimpses before "to be continued" and jumping back 30 years so that it's neither futuristic nor post-apocalyptic anymore. Oh, by the way, you know this one thing I/O had in its 3,5MB script and RD had in its 5MB script? Lots of worldbuilding. Loads and spades of worldbuilding. Like, 15x to 20x amount of worldbuilding VLR had to itself in its wildest dreams.
Also, A route was basically R11's Kokoro's route "on fire" - mixed, yes, with E17, and, well, less creepy when compared to some of R11's bad endings.
And, yes, calling a VN with a 5MB script, and 8 years from the first ideas to the release of the Xtend version "lazy" is just, yeah, well, not every VN can be a majestic masterpiece like teh glorious VLR, eh?