I wonder why? And Wes, am I actually imagining things and people all the time have said that they can't come up with a _character_ to match Solaufein?
There was a time when there were so few (romance) mods around that I got feedback from people who didn't like the idea of installing Sola. Now presumably they all go somewhere else (either to another author or somewhere else in Weimer-land: I can hardly count a "I love the tactics mod: great battles!" message as a blow against Sola.) In the "modern era" of incredible mod choice, people tend to pick some subset of the roughly two dozen mods available and then just tell me that they like that subset: I no longer hear why they discarded the ones that were not included. Only a few brave souls like Kaylord and Domi bother to tell me that they were displeased.
That being said, I do have quite a lot of data from the past.
Number 1 Reason For Not Choosing Solaufein: "Dude, he's gay!" Sad but true. Excuses of the form "I can't bring myself to romance a character who is possibly homosexual, even though he won't be in my particular game if I play a female" outnumbered all others. Total number ... at most 6?
Number 2 Reasons: "I'd love to tryout Solaufein now, but my character is already promised to SomeoneElse in my current game." I got two or three of these.
After that big winner there were a number of "peculiar" reasons voiced by more or less a single person.
Ex: "He's not voiced." Htn963 is the only member of this faction.
Most Solaufein criticism comes from people who have already tried the romance. It tends to fall into some rather large bins as well:
(1) "Solaufein is not interactive enough, I can barely tell that he's there, my PC seems to be doing all the work." This has been replaced by:
(2) "Solaufein is too interactive, and when he deigns to voice his opinion to NPCs my soverignity as unelected-dictator-for-life of the party feels threatened."
(3) "Solaufein features battles that are too hard." Despite much gnashing of teeth, fewer than ten people have said this explicitly.
(4) "Solaufein doesn't say enough after he sleeps with you." I don't really get this one anymore, but at least three or four people mentioned it at one time.
Now for the real interesting bits:
About 33% of all Sola page views come from that time zone that appears to have Italy and Germany in it (and 10% come from the adjacent ones). Falk, Pamm, Luciana and to a lesser extent Dyara have taken the time to give me a non-English-speaking perspective, and I get quite a few "I need help installing Solaufein and I'm from Europe, please forgive my English" messages. However, I get basically no feedback from such people. Either they all hate the mod and drop it immediately (unlikely) or it would be too much effort for them to translate their opinions into English for me so they don't. Are a bunch of you out there actually Germans and Italians (or whatnot) who have been fooling me with a perfect command of English?
About 25% come from this Hong Kong / Japan / Western Australia time zone. I have gotten at most one or two pieces of email total from China or Japan with respect to mods.
The conclusion here is that about half of Solaufein's users (apparently) don't even talk to me about the mod and mod development is driven by the people who get in my face about it (e.g., Kiki).
Does that help, or did I sidestep your question?