Well, there are many topict about Halsin on Reddit (probaly not the best place in the Internet but the audience there is massive and I hope Larian team read threads there) and hundreds comments inside of them. I checked a topic "Least Liked Companions Voting", for example, with a poll and Halsin is #1 mostly because: people don't know what to do with him, he is boring and needs to be polished and for some he is no more that a sex pest. So, he, for sure, needs more content, especially in Act 3.
At the time of being deleted, my post had only been up for a few hours. And likes on a post really isn't the best way to gauge dis/popularity of a concept either; I've seen other posts expressing the same idea as me get 60 likes while posts expressing your opinion get maybe 10. And each person also has their own motivations for clicking like; it might be the idea expressed in the post, or it might be how the post is written. A post saying the game shouldn't include therapy concepts got 30 likes, which by your reasoning would mean that more people don't want Astarion's sexual assault storyline to be part of the game either since that also falls under the heading of a therapy issue. And since i've never seen a post about Astarion's sexual assault, by default that would mean more people don't like Astarion's sexual assault than do, using that metric of "liking". We both know that isn't true- so "likes on a few posts on one Discord" is clearly not the metric to decide how liked or not a storyline is, let alone what the fix for that story should be.
Astarion's story of abuse goes through the whole game. Halsin has only one dialogue which appears out of nowhere and under very unexpected circumstanses. Again, I am pretty sure John wrote this dialogue only as a joke to give Halsin more points for being "sex machine" and not because he wanted to make him a survivor, but it seems the guy just used a very wrong tool. Otherwise we would not have such topics and reactions at all. But yes, only John knows the right answer.
