As a smidgen of context, it should be noted that Dearly Stars released literally two weeks after the original Love Plus, for which the hype was palpable - to the point where some of the Dearly Stars marketing material even referenced it - and pretty much everything aimed towards the same kind of market was utterly steamrollered, regardless of quality. People were too busy with their new DS waifus to produce idols.
Folks who actually played Dearly Stars (which I should really get around to doing) are generally positive about the characters, though - the games format is much more VN-like than the main series, and the characters have much more detailed, if maybe a little wacky, settings than the main iM@S girls (at least until aniM@S came along) to accommodate.
But, hey, at least they've got those nice, high-res Dearly Stars 3D models now. I honestly thought that the extra space in iM@S Channel, that disappeared completely when One for All was released, might have been a Dearly Stars HD port. Oh, well, it's not like apparent plans to do more with Shinkan Shojou panned out either.