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I totally think that while Claire and Sherry's relationship is important to the both of them, it makes more sense and is more interesting for their relationship to go this route.

From my own perspective, I got into RE as a kid through The Darkside Chronicles. I saw a little girl be protected by a badass biker chick and some guy and, as a little girl myself, fell head over heels for Claire's character. I put myself in Sherry's shoes and found her heroic for looking after a kid like me but at the same time, she was also as a protagonist I could look up to in the game's verison of Code Veronica where she takes front and center. The cutscene of Claire taking point while Leon carries Sherry is particularly imprinted in my brain and I still love Claire's character to this day. Honestly the RE2 crew in general are some of my favorite characters in the series.

But also, having revisited that game around the time the RE2 remake came out and thinking again about Sherry and Leon's situation made me look at his character in a different way. Aside from being like “Claire and Leon should've been at the club now that I'm in their 19-21 age range” it made me fully register and appreciate Leon's long-term commitment to Sherry since their situation isn't something capcom's ever committed to explicitly exploring. That's what I found interesting about him as a character on his own, not the generic "white man action hero who wants to help people in an abstract sense (and thought that being a cop would be a way to do that)" characterization that Capcom favors, particularly in the remakes.

(Also him and Ada's dynamic was something I loved from the jump and Ada has always been my favorite RE character/how I learned of the series in the first place but that's a separate topic)

Saying all this to say, it makes sense for Sherry to get really attached to Claire as the person (or more standout person in DSC's version of events) who actively cared about and protected her during the worst day of her life so far. Sherry having neglectful parents, with emphasis on the neglect from her mother, further affects that attachment to Claire.

However, based on both Claire's personality and Sherry's circumstances, it just doesn't make sense for Claire to become a mother-like figure to Sherry. Sherry had a mother-shaped hole in her life but Claire was a 19 year old who understandably was not thinking about kids and looked after Sherry simply because that was the right thing to do. She also simply had/has different priorities from finding her brother to her work in Terrasave.

Despite capcom's insistence of pairing Claire up with a child to look after in half of her major appearances post Code Veronica in both games and film, the mother role is just not who Claire is, at least not how I see her, even for Sherry. She'd care about Sherry in an older sister/cousin or child of the community kind of way but it's important to emphasize that Claire already has a sibling, is the younger sibling in that relationship and it was that connection that she was seeking out. That was her priority at the end of the day for obvious and understandable reasons. The reason Sherry clung onto Claire and later the idea of her, is in a similar vein of the reason why Claire was so focused on finding Chris in the midst of the traumatic events of Racoon City that they both went through. Because that's their anchor/older person they can rely on and in Claire's case it's also family she already knows and wants to make sure is ok.

And that makes sense. That's more nuanced and interesting to me than the alternative.

Claire also simply doesn't know the truth about Sherry's (and Leon's) situation, a plot point I always feel should've been actively explored in the franchise. So it makes sense why she wouldn't factor in Sherry into her decision at the end of Infinite Darkness the way I see Leon doing. I personally think Sherry and their circumstances was the main reason for his decision, him being afraid how it might backfire if traced back to him and hurt her. It wouldn't be the good/right/moral choice because it upholds the status quo. It would've been a choice made and out fear but that'd make sense for his character as someone who's in a messy situation no else knows about and is out of his depth so of course he's paranoid, compromised and making bad decisions. I think explicitly going about it from that angle, instead of leaving it up to us to speculate, and exploring the tension it creates between Claire and Leon in the long-run would've been interesting. I'm personally fine with Claire trying to check in Sherry, because she canonically intended to go back for them, just not because she fills the role of a mother figure. And even then, she's met with a lot of red tape which gets her suspicious and further adds to that tension between her and Leon when it comes to Sherry's wellbeing and the shadiness of the government. But, again, their entire situation isn't something capcom's committed to exploring which I think is a huge missed opportunity for all the characters involved both in and not in-the-know.

Post-Racoon, Claire couldn't and doesn't think about looking after Sherry long-term, again for understandable reasons, but Leon who doesn't have the objective of "find sibling" or any objective post-Racoon, and who circumstantially got abducted by the government and coerced into service in exchange for Sherry's relative well-being, logistically would. Personality wise, if we're going with the vague canon of him being an orphan with no siblings who presumably aged out of the foster system/never got adopted, that would give him personal motivation to want to look after the newly orphaned Sherry. To be someone definitively in her circle and working in her best interest, someone he didn't have as an orphan (maybe as a kid in general depending on how you wanna fill in those gaps). It's the base angle I like to go with personally and I see him as a brother-mother/parentified older sibling figure than strictly a parental figure cuz he was also still young in RE2. It also just makes more sense for Leon to, even with the limitations placed on them, have had more of an active role in Sherry's life for the sake of the narrative instead of only overhearing???? that she became an agent (that was never a writing a choice I liked from RE6).

But again, so much of RE lore when it comes to in-depth exploration of the characters and their relationships is... well, not as deep as it could be. But that's why we do things like this to speculate because that's how much the characters interest us.

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