But.

I don’t think I’d be able to let go of a story where I’d personally promised to help so many, either.

Because portraying intelligence in fiction is damned difficult.
The intelligence of a character cannot readily exceed that of its operator. If the writer is smart then the character can be smart. If the writer is stupid then the character will be stupid.

Writers will generally try to get by this by using contrived cleverness techniques. One of the main ones is giving them knowledge that the writer themselves wouldn’t have any means of knowing in their position… i.e. they “just know” things and you (the reader) are left to fill in the gaps as to how they figured this out. That way they come across as intelligent because they figure things out easily… while conveniently forgetting that the character, the world they exist in and the circumstances that surround them are all orchestrated by the same mind.

Unfortunately… it is damned difficult to avoid this sort of situation unless there are multiple creators explicitly keeping information from each other for the sake of a collaborative work. Even genuine intelligence transferred to fiction can come out the other end looking contrived.

(don’t mind me, just catching up again)