I don't understand any of the choices ATWT made the entire final decade they were on the air. It seemed as if as soon as they hooked onto something that could work and be reasonably entertaining, they would ruin it just as quickly.
Although I eventually got used to Marnie Schulenberg as Alison, I disliked the pairing of Alison and Casey. I got used to the recasts of both Alison and Casey somewhat but neither were as charismatic as the previous actors in those roles.
Worse still, ATWT took a hacksaw to the stories and characterizations of their young adult set of characters. It wasn't pretty.
The recasts of Craig and Paul and Adam were all pretty bad that decade. There was no good reason to recast Scott Holroyd. They also made Dusty, (a character who was once accepted to Harvard) into a low-rent gangster wannabe. Don't get me started on some of the storyline choices!
The big mistake that ATWT and Y&R and many of the other daytime dramas made was that they didn't bother to look for fresh talent for their writing rooms (and with ATWT being in NYC where you had Columbia University and NYU, and that is unforgivable).
The "cam girls" was likely some middle age dude's idea of a relevant storyline. Perhaps had Alison and Amber been living in Eastern Europe in the late 1990s, then sure it could've been relevant.
I tried to binge-watch a bunch of episodes between 2005-2007 after having spent months watching episodes from the 1980s and early '90s and boy the contrast in quality of everything was depressing.