I see. While this approach gives a couple of good opportunities, it also has one problem. For example, if some item tries to give Athletic trait, and for a start removes Tough, but then it turns out that Athletic is blocked. It means that the girl simply lose Tough without any benefits.
True, matter of game design I suppose.
Our new coder decided to rewrite the game in proper code. He also suggested that we could reorganize traits and sort of 'put them in slots'. Basically things like
Body: Tough, Athletic, Fragile;
Boobs: Small, Large, Huge, Abnormally Huge;
Personality: Meek, Tsunadere, Yanedere, Shy
and so on. That would definitely solve all issues but will also come with some limitations I expect.
In any case, I am going to do what I've always done, just code in code that works flawlessly and leaves as many avenues open as possible, if he doesn't leave/disappear before managing to rewrite the game, I'll try to switch to proper coding as well

. For now, if you want traits to behave differently, recoding them shouldn't be difficult.
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PS: You should get on mirc when you get a chance, even if just to sit there idly