Granted, if you were grinding supports, the petting minigame might be tedious. I played enough Engage to know how tedious it can be to play a minigame repeatedly. On the other hand, the localizers could have (and should have) just implemented a skip feature instead of removing it entirely.
I also saw the Retranslation patch's discord, and the creator of the mod mentioned "non-binary" people when greeting the rest of the Discord. You can tell the modder is a woke degenerate.
Though I will admit that it feels weird if not gay to pet Kaze. Camilla (or any of the waifus) on the other hand...
Now the modder didn't actually censor any outfits that the localization didn't already censor, but it's based on the official localization, and most of the localized script is left intact. The "rebalancing" completely makes the game easier, with Rinkah getting higher growth rates, physical 1-2 range weapons with no drawbacks being sold in the shops, and multiple weapons losing their drawbacks (and many of them no longer suck). Also, Nyx is a Witch by default instead of a Dark Mage, the same gender servant joins earlier (though at level 1), and Lilith was made playable. The retranslation arguably killed the game's balance, since Javelins and Hand Axes, the series' usual 1-2 range physical weapons, were designed to be unable to double in the original game. Nothing on the enemy side was changed gameplay-wise.
The story additions largely addressed a few complaints about the original game. Namely, the fact that vital story elements were locked behind 1 of the versions to incentivize players to buy all 3 routes. The mod also added some story into the game, based on the official drama CDs released exclusively in Japan. Fire Emblem if suffers from a serious lack of world building, likely because Awakening also lacked world building (but that's often excused because Awakening is a distant sequel to the Archanea games, which did have world building). The continent that Fire Emblem if takes place in doesn't even have a name.
I don't care much for the gay options. Enjoy that if you will, or don't if you're not into it. I might have a yuri pairing with Camilla in a future run, but otherwise I'm not interested. That said, Fire Emblem if originally only had 2 gay options, and were locked behind a specific version. The only male homosexual option is unavailable in Birthright, and the only female homosexual option is unavailable in Conquest. The retranslation didn't make everyone bisexual, but it did make substantially more characters such. That said, they also added some (non-gay) supports for Avatar-sexual characters who really should have had more supports in the original game.
The "retranslation" patch is hardly a retranslation at all. The script for the most part is the same as the Treehouse's localized script, but a few parts were edited because the mod creator thought it was "cringe". Yet they still kept in many lines that are cringe, such as the infamous "slappyface" line from Dwyer.
The Soleil supports were changed to something completely different from either the original Japanese or localized script. In the retranslation mod, Kamui tries exposure therapy on Soleil.
Overall, I like how they added some additional story where the original game was kind of lacking in, but it sucks how it's based on the localized script, and there's still all the censorship from the official localization. Unfortunately, the attempt at translating the game faithfully was cancelled, so you'll have to learn Japanese if you want to play a faithful version of Fire Emblem if.
Fun fact: I've actually played the petting minigame dubbed in English before. I used the original Japanese rom (with the translation patch), and used an English dubbing mod I found on a now defunct 3DS modding website.
By the way, once this patch is completed, would it be possible to replace the offical English dub with a dub with deepfake voices? Or is the technology still too primitive for that?