No one is saying women don't exist in the franchise or the spin-offs are not great. It's a discussion about them being the playable protagonists of the stories on main games (as they're meant for a wider audience), which means we play as women who are directly related to the main conflict and solve it by the end of it.
You've crafted your requirements in a manner so highly specific that I'm not sure there's really anything I can say that hasn't been said to you already. I disagree entirely with your assertion that remakes and spin-offs somehow matter less.
Once again, remakes don't move the franchise's story forward. Sequels do. Spin-offs do. But then again, spin-offs don't target a wider audience like the main series does.
Why is "moving a story forward" such a stringent requirement here? The Resident Evil plot doesn't linearly move forward; it bounces back and forth between the past and present. Looking at the series in this way is, at best, highly selective and flawed.
RE0 may have been a prequel, but it easily had the highest development budget of an RE game until RE5 came out. Yes, it was an even more expensive game to develop than RE4.
RE4, by intentional design, had a story that was not meant to matter at all. RE3 originated as a spinoff.
CODE: Veronica, a game you disregarded in an earlier post, has one of the most important plot lines in the entire series, Claire has 65% of the playtime in that title and Alexia is the primary villain. The only reason it had no number was because it was a non-PlayStation title, not because Capcom considered Claire unimportant.
Revelations had Jill playable for 75% of the story. Revelations 2 had 3 out of 4 protagonists as women, which is a very high ratio for series standards. Both games had women as primary antagonists. These titles matter just as much as the numbered RE games do in terms of the integrity and legitimacy of the products. Revelations outranked two counterparts (ORC and RE6) in 2012, and Revelations had more bearing towards Capcom's post-2012 direction with RE than RE6 did.
I think RE5 did a great job keeping things balanced. It was Chris' story, sure, but Sheva and Jill were easily part of what made the entire game so memorable.
RE6 isn't as dire as some have asserted here, either. Helena, Sherry and Ada were all important in their own right due to how the plot played out, and had more stake in the plot than Leon, Chris and especially Piers.
RE:3 (the remake) also appears to be retconning certain elements and added a new cliffhanger ending, so even saying it "doesn't move the story forward" might not end up being true.
