The Larians said they tried a bunch of different control schemes, and found that the one they implemented worked best, and at least in their opinion, worked well. Everyone has their own preferences on control systems; hopefully key re-mapping and/or gamepad use will accommodate most people, but nothing is going to work well for everyone.
I'm not saying you need to play through the game to have an opinion, but you are making some sweeping assumptions based on little playtime and not much else. If the beginning of the game is not fun for you, then it is just not fun, and may or may not be worth sticking with to see if it gets better (the beginning of DD was a little heavy on the hack and slash IMO, especially basically repeating it after playing the demo a few months before the game's release, but there were enough quests and humour, etc, in Aleroth to give a taste for the rest of the game).
The game being set in a human populated region of Rivellon hardly constitutes a complete break for the previous gameworld, though I would have preferred having other races included.
If Larian was going to make fundamental changes to pander to console gamers, they would not have bothered with a branching quest system, multiple solutions, moral dilemmas, etc.
I am of a similar opinion regarding
achievements, but it is an XBox requirement. Unfortunately console versions of games seem to do much better than PC versions, so that is almost becoming a requirement for a developer's survival.
I have not seen any advertisements in English and very few previews or reviews, let alone hype. What exactly did Larian do which mislead you? They have discussed various aspects of the game and development in the forum, and so far AFAIK you are the only person to see this game as a huge disconnect from the previous ones.
