Okay I forgot that you already played the game and know the characters...
And man in SR2 breaking into a nuclear power plant only with 1 person to get toxic waste to give Maeros tattoo artist so he can give him a toxic waste tattoo (which somehow did harm after tattoo was finished lol ) was SUCH A REALISTIC STORY MOMENT !!!!
SR2 is full of unrealistic stuff in its gameplay and story which is fine because thats what Saints Row is and always will be...
You older SR fans act like dumb and forget about all the weird shit SR1-2 had. Face it those games were almost same as SR3 with their unrealistic gameplay and story. SR3 had the style to match the crazy story,gameplay while SR1 - 2 was trying to be GTA with their visual style.
Thank God Volition listened the majority and not loud minority when making the game.
It's just as realistic as blowing up the doors of a maximum security prison and then slaughtering every single guard inside, or even shooting your way through several SWAT roadblocks after robbing a bank. Even the most realistic open world third person shooters like GTA IV have "unrealistic" moments like the one you mentioned. This is done to service the
gameplay, in these kinds of games a good way to increase the difficulty is to put a lot of enemies for you to fight at the same time or in quick succession. Of course if you compare this to real life 1 to 1 it's going to seem unrealistic, but in these games the player is always much stronger and/or much smarter than the AI which keeps the game from being unbearably difficult, so in return you need moments like this to keep the game from being too easy.
Do you understand now why this stuff is more easily accepted than actual bad writing that doesn't bring anything to the gameplay?
About the toxic waste, we don't even know what amount was diluted into the ink, or what kind of rays it was emitting, depending on those factors it's possible that it needed some time to have any effect after contact with the skin.
And once again, I'm sorry, but no, SR1 & 2 weren't the same as SR3. In the the first two you weren't fighting enemies with laser guns and spaceships, you didn't have gang members doing radio commercials or being the star of a reality TV show, you didn't have giant skyscrapers painted purple.
And no, I didn't use my DeLorean to play the game early. Like you, I'm just looking at the only clues that are available right now. Eli is supposed to be smart, the way he nonchalantly mentions his "exposure" to Kevin as if it wasn't posing a major security issue to their project, makes it very likely that Kevin isn't supposed to be stupid and it is indeed bad writing.
If a criminal that is prolific on social media is the kind of character that you'd like to interact with in a game, that's perfectly fine, but this character would be much more interesting if he made sense.
And last thing, I'm always ready to hear other people's points and opinions and discus them in a respectful manner, so let's not escalate things and turn this into a typical Steam forums discussion.