I was a member of the old Armalion forum. Armalion was meant to be that RPG first, an TDE RPG, then the development studio foldet, rests were bought up by Ascaron, who didn't have the TDE license, but first still wanted to make a full RPG - and at one point everything was turned into an Action-RPG.
In my theory the constant stream of comparing Armalion with Blizzard's Action-RPG (which was "high" at that time) made it inside of one rep's head "click" and he or she decided to make an Action-RPG out of it.
If ou are very familiar with TDE, you can still find fragments of TDE in it.
I know you know more than I know. YOU are the reason I know about Sacred, and the Dark Eye games like Drakensang. You posted quite a bit about Sacred/Armalion on here years ago and about TDE on Chaos Cascade.