You can either focus on the downside that day & night schedules may not be a full part of the game, or you can recognize the freedom given to players in this game.
Well, I think I've touched on the freedom concept a number of times, so I certainly recognize it and understand how important it is to some players. You're making it sound like that's escaped me, and it hasn't.
At the same time, it's caused an enormous amount of work which has now resulted in (to me) a more desirable (and certainly wider reaching) feature being cut. And that's disappointing, because it's a level of freedom that I'm honestly not likely to ever require simply because of the way I play RPGs. Thus, my appreciation for all that freedom is minimal. To me it's expensive fluff, one the game could have done without. Where as to someone else it may mean everything.
I don't (for example) randomly kill NPCs when I play through Divinity: OS. I don't even start a fight with the drunk guards at the bridge checkpoint. I'm not that chaotic or aggressive in my playstyle or role-playing that I need to kill off half the town without breaking the game in the process. To me, these are unrealistic avenues that I have no intention of going down, and so the fact that those alternate paths exist will always be meaningless to me. However, the impact it's had on Larian Studio's workload (which has resulted in the removal of the scheduling feature I strongly desired) is not meaningless to me. It's gone from expensive fluff to irritatingly expensive and costly fluff.
Obviously everyone will prefer one design element over the other and disagree on which one a game needs to be closer to perfection. Keeping that in mind, I recognize that players have the freedom to play through this RPG more haphazardly. But I'm not exactly going to throw a party over it, because it's a feature that is of no benefit to me personally, and the cost (I feel) was too high. It's a feature that will only benefit some players (while being completely lost on others like myself), where as day & night scheduling would have touched *everyone*. Unlike all that freedom, it's not a feature you have to seek out, it's a feature that pushes itself to the front and center every moment you're playing the game as the NPCs around you are reacting to both the changes in time and weather.
Of course, if you're more interested in just killing all those NPCs.. then who cares about scheduling, because you're going to be more interested in having freedoms and optional ways to cause havoc.
You are right, however, in that it was a difficult decision (both cutting day & night schedules, and allowing players to have as much freedom as they do) - the developers have said as much themselves.
