I can get past awful translations, and actually have for other art forms. I'm confident that this isn't the problem for visual novels, but that they are actually amateurish stories, neither books nor movies (nor games).

It's ok that other people like them though, I'm not the Good Taste Police.

> Though visual novels aren't quite mainstream even in Japan, they were quite popular. If the writing was uniformly terrible, it wouldn't have sold as much.

I'm sure you can find the flaw in "lots of people like this therefore it cannot be uniformly terrible". There are plenty of examples of this phenomenon.

In Spanish we have a saying: "eat poop, millions of flies cannot be wrong!".