As problematic as the treatment in Persona 4 could be at times, I think I would've rather had a game that at least tried to talk about queer issues (and failed in non-trivial ways) than a game that basically ignores them altogether except for cheap jokes. And I say this as someone who really enjoyed Persona 5. Of course, Persona 2 shows that this is a false dilemma; we shouldn't have to choose between two not-so-great options.
I wonder if some of this has to do with the difference in core conflict between the two games. Persona 4 is all about understanding and accepting yourself for who you are, which includes dealing with your own identity issues; someone trying to decide if they're queer or trans is an obvious part of that (even if ultimately the game shies away from actually giving us those characters).
Persona 5 is about pressure to conform to society and feeling like you have a place of belonging amongst others. While this SEEMS like this should also be ripe for queer representation for pretty obvious reasons, I wonder if this is a particular blind spot in Japanese society (or the Persona team in the specific) where they still think of lack of queer acceptance as an individual problem, rather than a systemic one. Obviously, I'm not an expert in the culture, and it's not like I can speak from experience. But it kind of feels like outside certain niches, LGBT representation isn't really a thing that gets talked about as a hot-button topic in the same way it does in certain parts of the West. On the one hand, that probably means much less violent rhetoric around the subject from anti-LGBT people (or fewer of them, maybe); on the other hand, that could also just mean a sort of silent repression where people don't talk about shunning LGBT people but it kind of happens as a matter of course.
