Thoughts about VN textboxes / text placements?

(Full disclosure: I'm an indie dev who sometimes experiments with different text placements.)

A: I feel a bit mixed about side textboxes. On one hand, it makes sense to me to have a side textbox because we read from left to right, and so if you have a character portrait to the left of the text, we can observe facial expression changes and then start reading the text more naturally, from left to right. To put it another way, it's like the entire screen is the textbox of an ADV VN with side portraits.

B: On the other hand, with ADV text boxes, there's nothing like taking up the whole screen, and it looks symmetrical as well, which is attractive. (With side textboxes, it can get annoying only taking in art from one side of the screen.) Does it matter if our eyes have to move more, to go between the face and the text, in an ADV VN? I'm tempted to say no, but VNs can be long and, with many facial expression changes for us to observe, that's a whole lot of unnecessary eye movement. It could add up, I feel. You could, as said above, use side portraits in your ADV VNs, but then I feel like that encourages you to not look at the rest of the screen?

C: Once, I experimented with having subtitle-like text (with no 'text box') ADV style, but raising it more to the lower center of the screen, rather than keeping it at the bottom. This lead to less eye movement between the face and the text, while still taking advantage of the whole screen, visually, to make things feel more like you were actually there. Also, the text was comfortably spread out vertically, largely taking up the bottom half of the screen, so it wasn't a concentrated block of text floating in mid air. And because it was only taking up the bottom half of the screen, it wasn't covering anyone's faces.

D: On the other, other hand, sometimes people do NVL text. I can understand why people like it, but I don't like the idea of covering all the art or darkening / brightening everything. Although, to be honest, people using NVL text seems quite rare... so rare that I don't think I've ever played a VN which was exclusively written in it. If I were to, I could see it growing on me a lot or even becoming my preferred style.

E: I've also seen text bubbles that appear all over the screen, in different places, depending on the art being displayed. Similar to NVL, I see why people would like this, but I like knowing where my text will appear. (Also, that seems like a headache from a developer perspective! To constantly change the position of your text, for every single line!) O_O

Anyway, this is a lengthy post, but I'm curious to hear your various opinions on this sort of thing. Do you have a preference? If so, what makes you like that preference? Let me know your thoughts? :)

Personally, I might be leaning toward C or D. With C, it seemed like a reasonable place to put text and it felt quite cinematic and non-intrusive, while at the same time keeping things symmetrical and cutting down on eye travel. With D, I could really see it growing on me.

Thanks for your time. <3