number of matches, number of replies to messages, number of dates, number of longterm relationships
I personally don't have a desire to maximize any of these numbers. Do you know anyone who explicitly wants to maximize "number of longterm relationships?"
I was being Socratic but the point I was trying to make is that I don't think there exists *any* metric that can adequately capture what people are looking for in a relationship. Hence, it becomes difficult to conclude that anyone is being "suboptimal", either.
I made tulpas because I was curious about the phenomenon. I did not find the creation process difficult. I thought for a long time about how to make tulpas useful but the best application I could find for them is possibly as a way of training an internal random number generator. I imagine they would be useful for fiction writing as well.