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Indeed. For all that talk about red text to guide the reader, it turned out to be just trickery. I still don't buy personality death. It's a ridiculous way to approach it.
In a normal mystery novel, your guide is the detective. What he says, you can take it as canon.
"I declare that no woman could have possibly committed this crime," says Vance in The Benson Murder Case.
What do you know? He was right! Because that's how detective novels work. You have the detective guiding you into the author's world, explaining how it works so that you can have a fair chance at the riddles yourself.
"What about a secret passage?"
"Nonsense, I would have noticed," says the detective.
That's your cue to know that the word of god has been spoken. There are no secret passages in this story.
I think Umineko could have been greatly more fun if Battler was a more competent detective. A detective doesn't just appear in mystery novels to be the deus ex machina, his function is like a tour guide. The reader can't be expected to guess how people think inside the world constructed by a random author, can he? That's where the detective comes in. "A man would never do X if a woman was in the room." Questionable statement if made about reality, and one the reader would never infer unless he had the same views that the author did. But once the detective declares such a thing, the reader is clued in on how the writer thinks, which is a vital component in making a work fair.
For all that thing about red text being the supreme truth, it ended up being less true than the general proclamation made by the detective in a mystery novel.
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