I know the appeal system is new and fancy and the devs want to show it off, but it is the wrong type of system to have it’s own page in the hearthling profile page and front end so much information.
Really it should be a completely hidden system which only shows up when the hearthlings have thoughts about there favourite things and when they get morale modifiers in the form of the surroundings look nice today etc.
The fact that it is completely exposed to the player reduces the mystery of the game, and if you are creating emergent behaviour by design you don’t really want the player to have easy access to the how or why this behaviour comes about. It is far more fun and interesting to let the players speculate about what is going on than just telling them.
If the gameplay consequences of such a system can’t be physically seen and felt by the player without throwing it directly in there face, then the game system is obsolete or needs tweaking so that it has a noticeable effect on gameplay.
This has also blown a massive hole in the stat consistency as exp and hp were reduced to just bars and now every item has an appeal stat that is a number and the player can see just how much effect there items appeal is having on the hearthlings An ugly solution to a non issue. Why remove one stats visibility and then introduce another stat that has far less importance in the game as a whole and make it completely visible.
Finally, when effort based crafting comes in are we going to have next to the item in the UI, the appeal, the carpenters effect, the weavers effect, the herbalist effect and so on.
Plus I feel the less information in the UI and the more information that is just displayed naturally though gameplay effects and changes the better.