Well, Choice of the Cat combines its cats-eye-view humor with an acutely drawn portrait of a marriage at high risk of disintegration, and allows the player to either rescue or destroy that relationship. Despite being a comedy, there’s a lot more serious stuff going on there than in 90% of CoGs. Tastes vary, and it’s futile to try to talk someone into liking something…but if “childish” is your main takeaway from CotC, I think you might be focusing on the tip of the iceberg instead of what’s there just beneath the surface. Still doesn’t mean you’re going to enjoy what’s there under the surface, but it deserves to be noticed, and it’s not childish at all.
Trust me, it didn’t. 
I was very mindful that Rebels came out right on the heels of three terrific games, one of which was longer when considering code efficiency.
(The CoG website also displays the games in reverse order of release, in case you ever want to check what order things got released in).
There’s a discussion of it further down on that thread I linked to. It’s possible to wirte a ChoiceScript game with a lot of cut-and-paste, so the same words (or nearly the same words) appear multiple times. Tin Star is legitimately a huge game, but if you looked at its code, you’d see a lot of repetition across different choices; it’s not really twice as long as Choice of Magics.
CS has some features (mostly added after Tin Star was written) that let you code without cut-and-paste repetition. *gosubs, notably, where instead of copying out the same text in multiple places, you just use a gosub command to repeat that text wherever it needs to appear. “Multireplace” can also be more efficient compared to older workarounds for e.g. plural pronouns. An efficiently coded game makes use of these tools.
Well, I was comparing three games of roughly equal word count. I’m sure word count is significant, but genre is also an important factor in driving game sales. It would be interesting to know how e.g. the Superlatives or Hero Unmasked sold compared to Choice of the Cat and Tally Ho – games that are (more than) twice as long, but in a less popular, less action-packed genre. They’re all in the same sales bracket on Google Play.
For six or seven years, I’ve been reminding people that the forum != the market (usually in the context of pointing out that the market likes Zach Sergi’s games a lot more than the forums do). So I entirely agree with you that we’re a small, unrepresentative share of CoG’s base, and “helped somewhat” was all I was suggesting for Rebels’ devoted forum following. I hope we eventually get confirming evidence from other CoG authors who post their live WiPs on the forum as I did (though there are good reasons they might not).
Finally, I’m very glad you liked Rebels, and thanks for the kind words about it.
Completely variable. Depends on the words, depends on my mood. Sometimes it flies, sometimes it really doesn’t.