Pelin

On "she does not do it to guests": that is the part that tells you this is a social bond rather than a room preference.

Following behaviour is directed at the person the cat is attached to. Guests are not that person, and are also not predictable enough to be worth following.

Worth mentioning only because people sometimes worry that following is anxiety. Attachment-following looks relaxed: she arrives, settles, may groom or doze. Anxious following looks different, pacing, vocalising, not settling, and it happens everywhere rather than in one room. From your description, yours is the first kind.

The most common cause by a wide margin is acid, and it explains everything in your description including why salt half-worked.

Most home curries are rich, sweet-ish and savoury with nothing sour to push against. That combination reads as flat no matter how much spice is in it, because there is no contrast. Salt helps a bit because it sharpens perception generally, then hits its own ceiling - which is exactly the pattern you described.

The fix is a squeeze of lemon or lime at the end, or a spoon of tamarind, or yoghurt stirred in off the heat, or a splash of vinegar. Start with less than you think. The target is not "tastes sour", it is the point where everything else suddenly gets louder.

This is the single most reliable rescue in the whole category, and most recipes leave it out because the writer adds it by instinct without noticing.

There are two more that are narrower and useful if you want to be precise about the cause rather than the symptom.

Dependency bloat: the program is enormous because it pulls in a large tree of libraries, most of which it barely uses. This is the one behind most modern cases and it is why an application that does very little can still ship hundreds of megabytes.

The second-system effect, from Brooks: the tendency for the follow-up to a successful simple thing to be overloaded with everything that was left out of the first one. It names a specific and very recognisable failure, and it is often the honest diagnosis when a version 2 is four times the size of a version 1 that people liked.

If you are writing about a specific program, naming the cause lands harder than "bloated", which people read as taste rather than analysis.