Also, go watch a clip of Gordon Ramsy to see when I think about your statement, while I teach to to prove a suppression with incidental evidence.
Triangle island is not involved in any quest, it has one type of random enemy, who, does not attack you, and stays invisible until you do something to him. He has one attack, which is a time based decay death, he is vulnerable to one attack, doom or something, which is also death, he gives out more esper points then any other character in the game, before or after the ruin, and ONLY esper points. If you go their without the proper spell, you either do nothing to him and keep missing, or if you use some spells, he wakes up and kills you. If you don't go there, nothing happens... no quest is lost... it literally doesn't need to be in the game... it's a *shhhh shhhh* a secrete.
Roland: But you can't be sure... and you can't summarize without knowing something for absolutely sure.
Here's another cookie. Would you like milk? It was common practice back then to put helpers in for your players. Even the Nintendo Power Strategy guides told you to go to those place to exactly that... level really quickly. And arcades... didn't have those kinds of tricks because... *shhh another secrete* they wanted you quarters.
Roland: That's still not proof.
FINE! Here's another cookie. You really want those... |cookies... Roland...|. See there's two lines there...
Skill trees were first truly introduced with Diablo to try to increase difficulty. Sometimes you had to chose between one aspect of character design or another... but the tree was more or less designed to be filled out as you reached the end... the games wasn't open world, although you could go back to previous areas. It was meant to be played a crawler, and tailored its mechanics as such.
Roland: Which is what 7DtD is doing.
Shhh shhh, here's another cookie. There was no level requirements, except to get the points. Building games like Warcraft, the first one, had level specific gates, you could only build such and such when you build so and so... and this was used do to the limitation of diverse resources. You had trees, gold, food, gas, crystals, whatever... usually only two or three. Instead of needing to go out and find a special McGuffin to make progress, they made you build something... upgrading was added to give you a slight edge.
You see... Trees were invented to advance character development for epic boss battles... gates where invented to simplify resource management... Trees where augmented with cascading unlockables... but still meant to be used to prepare for boss battles. Every other enemy was usually rubber-banded to keep the player engaged, but not overly swamped.
Then Fallout 1 and 2 happened... created by interplay... and they tried to combine the two... and... secrete secrete... it worked. AND ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE JUMPED ON THE BAND WAGON. Fallout 3 happened, it moved from a top down to first person... things stated to hemorrhage, New Vargas gave it a shot in the arm... Fallout 4 made it much worse, they tried to add a building aspect that is really... bad...
Before you say anything, here's another cookie... if 7 Days is Walking Dead, meets Fallout, meets tower defense, meets whatever... it's attempting to combine several distinct genre with their own distinct mechanics... none of which were designed to work with one another... Gating supposes a need to hold the player back so not to leap forward due to lake of diversity... Skill trees are designed to enhance rubber banding and prepare a player for epic battles in a linear progression... tower defense had upgradeable installations to ward off waves off attacks, but rewards successful warding off... limiting abilities like caring space, quality of craftables, weight, are carrot and stick techniques utilized to compel a player to improve their abilities instead of hunkering down... and states like agility and perception, are first person stat sheets designed to specialize a character into a particular class...
At the moment... every one of those competing mechanics... are being consolidated into one progression matrix... it not a stat sheet, not quite a tree, not really a cascading perk table... it is literally... nothing... it is nothing it needs to be to do everything it wants to. It's 30 years of game design... in 5 or 6 genres... trying to boil itself down to 4 or 5 character building pages...
Roland: Fun Pimps is working this stuff out, blah blah blah-be-blah...
I just gave you the cliff notes version of of stuff it's taken my entire life to learn... get your own damn cookie.
- - - Updated - - -
It was a joke, but not for your benefit... In comedy, you would be called the subject.
---edit---
I'm betting myself a hundred bux that my next thought is, "you can't be reasoned with, I'm out."