It is common to tell the story in novels in the past tense. When a story is narrated in the past tense, the past tense prose is equivalent to our present tense, as we follow the unfolding story.
NOTE: In my previous revision, I tried to simplify the reason of the use of the past tense to "to depicts events in the story as something happened before the time the author wrote the novel". But that is inaccurate. For example, a futuristic setting where people could travel faster than light is commonly told in the past tense too. (Credits go to F.E. for pointing this out to me in our chat room.) It's probably the best to think of the use of the past tense in novels as a literature device. Also note that there are several narrative styles. Narrating events in the past tense is the most common in novels.
It might be possible to write a story only in the simple past tense, but that will make the sequence of the story very sequential, each of the sentences refers to a specific event in the story, one happened after another, on and on and on. Isn't that kind of boring?
Naturally, the author needs a way to describe events that happened before the moment happening in the story. How can they do that? To say things happened in the past before the past, as you already know, we use "the past perfect".
A Tense Shifting Experiment
To sum it up, in novels, we usually narrate in the past tense. The simple past tense is used for the usual present tense. And the past perfect is used for the usual present perfect and simple past.
To make things more clear, let's try a little experiment together. Let's see what it will be like if we write the same thing in the present tense.
Original:
When he had walked me to my door, he had kissed me. Like before, it had felt good, and the closeness had been nice. His taste was warm, and the gentle touches of his tongue against mine had been exciting. I had been happy to stand outside and kiss him for hours. But Linc had ended the kiss and then let out a deep breath before kissing me on the forehead and saying goodnight.
Let's shift the whole narrative to the present tense:
When he walked me to my door, he kissed me. Like before, it felt good, and the closeness was nice. His taste is warm, and the gentle touches of his tongue against mine was exciting. I would be happy to stand outside and kiss him for hours. But Linc ended the kiss and then let out a deep breath before kissing me on the forehead and saying goodnight.
Since the past perfect is used for the usual present perfect and simple past, it's up to the reader to interpret which one makes more sense to them. This is one possible interpretation.
One thing is clear. The only "present" in the narrative is this part, "His taste was warm". The rest happened before this "present". Why? Because the past perfect forces that. So there's nothing wrong with the past perfects. In fact, I believe that they're required. (Though, as you seem to know, you don't have to use the past perfect unless you really have to).
What appears to be the author's intention is that the narrator (the one who put her memory into words for us) was thinking back to a kiss she had received earlier from Linc. So, that kiss becomes the "now" of her thought, as indicated by "was", in the narrative. And it seems to be the author's choice to use a lot of past perfects to narrate her reminiscence.
NOTE: In my previous revision, I shifted "I had been happy to ..." to "I was happy ...". This is less than idea, for the writer seems to intend that "I had been happy to ..." to actually mean "I would have been happy to ...". (This is probably to give us a hint about her personality.) So a better shifted-to-present version would be "I would be ...", which is equivalent to "I would have been ..." as it should have been in the narrative. With all the pieces falling into place, I decided to revise the shifting of "... against mine had been exciting." to "... was exciting.", too.
Now, let's get back to your question: whether your rewriting make sense or not?
As you can see now, if you replaced some past perfects with a simple past, it could change the order of what happened in the story.
Let's see what would happen if we applied your changes to the shifted-to-present version:
When he walked me to my door, he kisses me. Like before, it feels good, and the closeness was nice. His taste is warm, and the gentle touches of his tongue against mine was exciting. I would be happy to stand outside and kiss him for hours. But Linc ended the kiss and then let out a deep breath before kissing me on the forehead and saying goodnight.
Another issue is now obvious. "When he walked me to my door, he kisses me," is ungrammatical. (And so is "When he had walked me to my door, he kissed me.") We usually use when to state things that happen at the same time. Though when to after can fix that, but your story will be a different one. It also seems to make less sense than the original, "Linc ended the kiss" after "he kisses me". Isn't that strange?
I suppose "during the last week" is grammatical but for some reason it sounds awkward. Native English speakers would be more likely to just say "last week" or "this past week". With these expressions, "during" is redundant.
Native speakers do talk this way when emphasizing a duration of time. It's fine to use the simple past with during, but again, it sounds odd when paired with "last week" or "past week".
During the last week she played the violin twice.
This would require an unusual context in which I wanted to accurately emphasize how many times she played the violin in the given period. More natural is:
She played the violin twice last week.
During feels more useful when referring to events that themselves don't describe a period of time:
During the campaign the candidate made many outrageous promises.
I heard my friend snoring during class.
It was during the war that he met his wife.
If you want to talk about actions that happen repeatedly over a period of time, simple past or present is fine. It's natural to be explicit about how often these occur.
This past week I arrived home every night at 7.
Last week I visited my mother at the hospital three times.
During this past week I kept meticulous records of every time I saw the man in the red beret walk by my house.
Best Answer
The past tense and present perfect tense may seem similar, but they are very different. The past tense describes a specific event, e.g. "John ate an apple". It's like a story.
The present perfect tense on the other hand is not a description of a specific event. It is only an assertion that there exists an event fitting the details of that sentence, and the event completed before the present. "John has eaten an apple" means the event of "John eats an apple" occured at least once in John's lifetime.
If I were to draw a picture that directly represents "John ate an apple", I would draw a picture of a man eating an apple, an the "time within the drawing" would be in the past.
If I were to draw a picture that directly represents "John has eaten an apple", I would draw nothing, because the sentence is just an abstract fact like "Most people use cellphones".
Therefore, if someone asks you,
You should reply with a description of "what you did for the holidays". You can give a description by using the past tense. You could say:
If you had replied "I have been/gone to Switzerland" it would feel very out of place -as if you were saying a random fact about yourself.
Keep in mind that I these are just my observations as an American English speaker. I've heard that British speakers use the present perfect tense to also describe specific events, but Im not sure.