Types of Visual Novel Structures

So I was reading a review of World End Economica on Siliconera and the author posted this in the comments:

Well VN's fall on a spectrum. There are hybrid designs that mix in parts of other games, and on the other end there are games like these that are zero interaction, rarely localized PC releases. I usually say people should ease themselves into visual novels slowly. A good sequence might be

1. A hybrid crowd pleaser (Ace Attorney or Professor Layton are obvious starting points)

2. A cinematic focused or locked room type games (999 or Danganropa are solid options here)

3. Date sims! My favorites are Katawa Shoujo and My Hatoful Boyfriend

4. Full on Visual Novels. If you've made it this far and are still game to keep going then it's time to start looking into MangaGamer's releases, and to start looking into fan translated ROMs for games that didn't see localization. Try to find Radical Dreamers if you can, it's the little known visual novel SNES sequel to Chrono Trigger. It's worth experiencing.

I am trying my hardest to go starting from 4 up to 1.  Mainly because my first exposure with VNs was not with Ace Attorney or 999 (surprisingly), but by JAST USA / Peter Payne stuff.  I have since amended my exposure and now rarely read PC-only VNs now. 

On the dev front, not being much of a writer and unable to have either the skill nor the budget for a lot of unique HD art assets its difficult to find success with #4.  So I've been adapting a lot of the structural design of #2 and #1... well mainly, lots of animations, lower resolutions (to make it easier to make assets and to animate them, since I don't have a huge canvas I need to fill).

I'm trying to find other types of VN gameplay besides escape the room puzzles, giving gifts to rack up points (dating sims), elimination rounds where the character roster is slowly reduced, and point and click investigations.  Yes, there are dungeon crawlers and turn-based RPGs, but that's a whole nother genre, technically speaking.  I need to find more gameplay types that can fit into the medium that won't be considered tacked on like minigames (and then the players would demand that they be skippable).

Are the segments in Virtues Last Reward skippable?  Of course not.  They're integral to the game.

And yet nobody explicitly says that VLR is a VN.  They just praise the narrative experience.