If you place the stacks of potions right beside each other in your inventory, you can go through a stack fairly quickly, though an option to mix all would be handy.
Most of the equipment I used throughout the game was from random drops, though I did end up with the dragon armour and holy sword / sword of the gods.
At least with one handed swords, you can get better damage with random drops or merchant inventories (I vaguely recall a damage range reported of about 76 - 110 or 115) than you can with unique swords that are always in the game (71-100).
Have you increase the game's difficulty level?
For the Elrath quest, if you go to the cave first, even if the orc was there and you noticed the barrels of poison, you couldn't really interrogate him if you didn't know that the farmers' fields were poisoned. Quests could certainly be more flexible, but logically for any semi-elaborate quest you are going to have to take certain steps before other options become available. The barriers that block sections of a quest could be more natural than an NPC / key / etc simply not showing up until an event triggers it, but overall DD's quests are still better than in many RPGs.
The wastelands are primarily hack and slash. However, I did a lot of finishing off quests before doing the blessing ceremony, so was in the mood for some hack and slash by then. When I got bored with that I just went straight for the end bosses, and ran past much of the fighting on the way there.
