Either way, I feel the whole discussion with Carina's men and whoring Qum escapes the topic when it starts being framed as "you sacrifice Carina's men so that you don't have to whore Qum".
Inferring that is just plain incorrect since most optimizers simply sacrifice Carina's men because there is no tangible benefit to saving them under any metrics that make up for their cost (irrelevant for future events, no unique item rewards, no increase to country scores, no increase to valuable RP), the decision to whore Qum on the other hand can be a bit more balanced, but the guaranteed cons currently outweigh the foreseeable pros (the main pro would potentially be 1 extra small investment at some point in the game, the cons are less Yhilin and Arclent acceptance, less potentially valuable RP with some lategame entities, and a bit less EXP from missing 2 days in Simon's route).
Now I'm not saying the only way to optimize is to do pure numeric min-maxing, you could set different categories and claim you are making optimizations where saving Carina's men is mandatory, but even then whoring Qum might not be a very popular choice. Issue is, even if the extra ProN can have more impact in a playthrough where you are more ProN starved due to paying for early mercs, it has already been proven that it is possible to optimize a fairly good run that saves Carina's men AND doesn't whore Qum, so it is not really a matter of "you need to whore Qum to save Carina's men", it becomes a matter of "you need to whore Qum so you can have an extra 1 or 2 minor investments that you wouldn't get while saving Carina's men". And since saving Carina's men is already a self-imposed restriction based on "wholesome roleplaying", why wouldn't you choose to not whore Qum for the same reasons?