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Hm...I see your point, and even agree with you to an extent. I've come across a number of LNs that had ear bleeding music or terribad art. I think that it comes from the fact that their work probably wouldn't be accepted in a normal novel market and, in terms of the normal otaku's interests, they think that visual stimulation will be a lot more attractive than LNs, which are filled with words and don't allow for user interaction. Or something.
Though, in Steins;Gate's case, it felt more real as a Visual Novel...and I think that's the real problem. I love the anime and all, but it's clear that the studio set out to make an anime rather than...well, Steins;Gate. 5pb was VERY specific about how it wanted to portray the relationships between characters, often making them more complex and inconspicuous than they are presented in the anime. Regardless, they were all human emotions for human characters, and they had the freedom to make the characters human and develop the characters at their leisure because the game had no time limit and knew that the player was in for the long haul. The studio that handled the anime, however, had much, MUCH less time, and decided that it would be better to instead make the relationships far more on the surface and, in some cases, generic (this was largely the case with Makise Kurisu, whose role as the annoyed intelligent member was basically changed to the tsuntsun blushing intelligent member that said "pervert" a lot). Plus, a lot of the game was cut out (which was inevitable), so quite a bit of character development was left out (especially in Mayuri's case) as was an incredible amount of character interaction.
That's my spiel, I guess. In short, the VN was far more human, less cliched, and the anime could have been handled better. The Dating Sim vibe doesn't really exist there, though I expected that it would, especially after I found out that there's an ending for each female LabMem. But they handled the endings unexpectedly well, and they weren't just "X falls in love with Okabe, the end." Rather, the VN knew what it was trying to do and what it wasn't, and did well not to conclude all that the game tried to develop into a dry love solution.
