But in all seriousness, and look, I am not saying 100% that this is the reason Anne didn't explore Daniel much after the DM chapter, but this was something that was openly talked about on my VC mailing list back in the day, about what might have been going on about that.
So the thing is, and people kind of get this confused, but in the book, Daniel did not have a drug problem; he had a drinking problem. And yes, you can maybe look at him becoming addicted to Armand's blood as the drug metaphor here, but at the same time, Daniel was also addicted to alcohol. Bourbon to be exact.
And that alcohol abuse problem is, in the end, what was killing him. And the bigger thing is, Anne was very likely drawing on her own experiences when writing about Daniel's alcohol abuse.
Because after her daughter died, she noted years later that she and her husband, Stan, both pretty much used alcohol to deal with the pain of it. IIRC, she basically said they became like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald with how much they were drinking during that time.
So I think, to some extent, in regard to Anne having to put Louis away for a time because he was too linked to her feelings about her daughter and the pain of that, Daniel's character was a bit too linked to her experiences in how she first dealt with that grief.
And another truth is? It wasn't until after she killed off Armand at the end of Memnoch the Devil that she actually understood just how much many fans actually did love his character. Before then, she honestly did think the majority of readers hated him, which is why she did it. I think if it hadn't been for the "Armand Lives!" tee-shirts and stickers people wore to Memnoch book signings, she would have never brought him back.
So yeah, people who weren't there probably don't know it, but Armand was originally supposed to remain dead after Memnoch. And so, just like why Louis didn't end up getting replaced as Lestat's main love interest by David Talbot (because fans rejected it), Armand came back because fans wanted him back.
So I think, even though Daniel's character didn't do much at all in the final trilogy, that might also be why Anne likely even bothered to bring Armand and Daniel back together in the little way she did. Basically, it was something fans had been asking for since The Vampire Armand, the book where she basically brought Armand back. (Though doing so with a meta-comment passage towards those fans who had hated Memnoch and said that Armand killing himself over a religious symbol was OOC.)
Anyway, she didn't start setting Lestat and Louis to finally get back together until The Prince Lestat Trilogy. Before then, what appeared to be the final book in the series, Blood Canticle, ended with them very much not together, and her experimenting with a Lestat/Rowan pairing. Because, again, this was the period where fans were rejecting David, but Anne still wasn't interested in exploring Louis anymore. And Daniel was with Marius, having gone mad, and was being taken care of by him.
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