(Yeah, I'm late to the party. But it's less than a month old, barely, and doesn't really deserve its own thread)Gryphon has a bad habit of letting his characters get away from him. It happened in NXE and SoS, and probably some other places too - he may have had a rough idea of where things were going, but the characters had other plans, and the story wound up someplace unexpected. Most of the time it works out pretty well anyway. Occasionally they manage to paint themselves into a corner.
That's what Utena, Anthy and Corwin did here. Their relationship was a complicated snarl that needed sorting out somehow. Sure, it was a bit of a contrived solution to the problem, but so what? I don't think there was going to be a "good" solution here, because a romance-type plot line of some kind was called for, SoS isn't really into the whole romance theme, and I don't think Gryphon's really had much practice at writing that type of story anyway.
It doesn't matter that it's not the best part of the series, or the most inspiring thing that Gryphon's ever written. It got the job done, and let him get back to the sort of stuff he does best. It might not be amazing, but I'd call it, at the very least, "adequate". I'm no literary critic, but my reaction to it as the end of SoS4 was basically: "yeah, that'll do... now what next?".
In a way, Anthy's attitude in 'For Today' reflects this, being basically: "get this crap out of the way so we can get on with our lives". Despite all its immediate significance to the characters, the act wasn't the important part. The important bit was the "get on with our lives" part.
Do I have a point here? If anything, it's this: this may not be one of the Symphony's high points, but it's not really a low point either (except possibly by comparison to the rest of it, because I'm having a hard time thinking of a low point right now). And ultimately, it just isn't worth fretting over. This plot line was *necessary*, but the important thing is not the manner in which it happened, just that it *did* happen.