I'm sorry for the late response! But it warms my heart to hear about people hating Sam Drake, who is the worst. I found him slightly more bearable in The Lost Legacy, but only because Nadine hated him twice as much as I did; I resented his presence less when he spent most of his screentime just getting dunked on relentlessly by the protagonists.

There's a surprising amount of Sam Drake/You, The Reader fanfiction, so I suppose he must have found his audience somewhere! But I didn't like him at all, and I couldn't make myself believe Nate had a brother when there hadn't been a single mention of siblings in the previous games.