> I've finished POA now, but I'm still wondering about the the significance of certain parts of the game. Generally, in adventure games, everything is useful in some way, otherwise it wouldn't have been put in. There are two things I found a bit strange:
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That usually goes for things which require a lot of time for implementation -- for the author's sake more than the player's. As such it's more applicable to text parser games where you'd have to describe any additional object including how it reacts to various actions you try with it (or in the case of NPCs, how they react to telling them or asking them about topics, or giving them objects).

With AGL (and presumably similar styles of text games) that doesn't have to be done, and a bit of flavor text describing something can be added in somewhere around 10 seconds with no additional requirements for interaction. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to put in a lot of objects like that, but a few of them sprinkled around seems like a good idea to me to give a better feeling for the setting.

> In the arbotoreum, before Sawyer arrived, there was an old woman asleep on the bench. You could never even talk to her. I figured she might have been Verna, on a walk, but why was she there?
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No, she was apparently just a random unidentified person. She can't be Verna, because you can get into Verna's room early enough in the main plot sequence for the old woman to be in the arboretum at the same time.

> Also in the arbotoreum, there were two metal doors: one by Rizardo and one by the Aviary. I could never open these, and obviously there was nothing behind them, because I managed to finish the game fine. Was there any way to open them, and if so, what was the point?
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No, there was no way you could open them. But of course, it's possible that there *could* have been something there which would only be required on some particular path through the game (witness the many things that people try, to no avail, to find when they play through Trail of Anguish with much reference to the forum).

> There were also a few doors that didn't seem to open, or had nothing behind them, but I guess these were just to make up the numbers.
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> Any answers would be appreciated...

Yes, I think in this case leaving it at the bare minimum of description (only describing doors if there was a way to get into them at some point in the game) would have made things seem too small. ("What, there are only 10 people with rooms on this station? No one else is allowed to sleep?") Of course, even with the 24 doors to various living quarters, it still seems like a small number, but there has to be some point where you stop adding passageways and doors if you're not going to allow the player to look in them. Really, the station is supposed to have several times as many such crew's quarters areas as are described. I imagine there'd be about 200 people on the station, perhaps more.