Meh, personally I think DDLC got popular because 1) It's free 2) It has cute girls in it (Somehow it managed to grab the attention of people into waifus despite the cast being intentionally awful) and more importantly 3) It caught the attention of several Youtubers that spread word of mouth.
It's pretty much "first meta visual novel" for quite a lot of people.
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it actually does very little never before seen in this medium, and to reach that little you have to go through at least two hours of absolutely boring stuff which didn't seem well executed neither in foreshadowing what's gonna happen (it throws it into your face when loading and then waits too much to actually deliver something).
Nothing wrong with it, especially because it does
good tease for an interesting future project