The process image makes it clear that they are lying. Step 3 is step 4 with bits crudely painted out. You can see it easily on the shoulder and chest. They are making up intermediary steps after the fact, which would be unnecessary if there were intermediary steps.
As a general rule, somebody is going to patent every aspect of these formats. They haven’t been demanding licensing fees from open projects, so they aren’t being baddies. The fact that they could kept a lot of projects from including direct support.
Production quality is the death of high-choice RPGs. When a game has two artists pumping out dozens of assets a day and every choice just changes some text and objects around, you can afford to give the player a ton of choice. Even the early DA games were on the tail end of that, with all the dialogue voiced, requiring recording and implementation cost for every line.
These days, big games are expected to have not just voiced dialogue but to have choreographed cutscenes. Making your animators spend a week on a cutscene 5% of players will see is viewed as a waste of money, so you cut the decision branch that leads to it.
There was a period in the late 90s to early 2000s where you could make an RPG that was top-5 in every way. That will never happen again.
Chick is the main one. They are very strict about the level and form of religion their franchisees practice. I sat next to a lady on a flight once who was flying to their corporate office so that she could demonstrate how good of a trad wife she is in order to increase her husband’s odds of landing a franchise.