No time to figure out how to include Grant. But here's this guy named Godbrand that no one gives a dick about that gets all this screen time. Ugh.
Here's this guy named
"Thinly Veiled Peter Stormare Who Is Always Welcome In Everything Because He's Hilarious and Has a Lot of International Appeal and Name Recognition". And Godbrand dies halfway through the season, so he's not actually there that long. He's also there so that Dracula's generals essentially have
A voiced character, otherwise they're all mutes (which I'm ticked about, but I'll live).
Sorry but, they made the right call. Grant's most interesting stuff happens after Dracula's dead, and he doesn't really contribute that much to the fight. His greatest legacy is helping to rebuild and lead Wallachia after Dracula's death (which gets sabotaged just a few years later by Dracula's Curse, but he gave it the ole' college try, bless). Grant also has the unfortunate distinction of being a character that most players tend to skip over or drop asap, and routinely comes up in polls and surveys as the most forgettable of CV3's cast of characters, and he usually ranks poorly across the cast of the series as a whole, little better than guys like Maxim Kischne and Reinhardt Schneider.
By including Carmilla, Hector, and Isaac, they'd essentially maxed out on main characters. Adding more would have started to stretch the season, which already has rather a lot happening in a short span. By introducing Sticky Pirate to the main cast, they take time away from what's already happening to explain why he's important, and giving him enough screen time to make him feel like he contributes something. It also torpedoes the character dynamic between the 3 mains we already had and forces a new one to be developed, all of which takes time, and Season One is 4 half hour episodes and Season 2 is 8.
Where do you suggest they put all that? It's not like they can phone up Netflix and be like "we need to grossly inflate the budget and get more episodes and add six months of production time because there's this one guy we HAVE to include". Most production companies aren't keen on people who ask that, either, so the very act of asking may have been Adi Shankar risking his job.
With the episodes they had to work with, cutting Grant was absolutely the right production decision. Nothing they could do would please everyone, but this was definitely the best compromise they could make.