The large downloads required right now after a DVD install is a direct result of Larian's developers working on finishing the game right up until the very last minute. It wasn't a case of "here's some bugs we wanted to patch on day one", but rather a chunk of significant "stuff" that simply did not get finished in time for the gold master.
I'm not suggesting they should have simply focused on bug fixes after sending the gold master to duplication, and I'm glad they're continuing to work on the game rather than scrapping late features or dropping support post-launch as so many other developers do. But let's at least call it what it is and not pretend the original poster should know better. They blew past their deadline, this is the result, and it's a situation nobody wanted nor could have predicted with 100% certainty.
For people with slower (or no) internet connection, the very bad habit of developers falling back on larger and large "patch" downloads as a safety net to finish the game can get seriously irritating. 20 years ago I had producers freaking out if patches were more than 10 MB. Now it seems like this kind of thing is no longer a consideration, as if everyone in the world is enjoying high-end broadband connections.
