BTW, today in Swen's talk at EGX he addressed this issue in the context of someone asking about voice overs. He mentioned that in order to do VO, they tried re-writing the lines to first person. When they did that, it didn't make sense for the different races because "none of them would talk like that." So in essence, when they tried turning the indirect dialogue into believable first person dialogue, it turned one line of dialogue into fourteen.
I suppose some people are still not going to accept the reasoning because they would be happy with generalized dialogue that would fit any one of the races and origin stories (it's been done in RPGs before, obivously), but that's not the vision Larian have for the game. I think this is pretty similar to the day/night cycle decision from DOS1. There were folks who would have been happy with a purely aesthetic version without NPC schedules and the like, but Swen had no interest in adding it unless it was meaningful.
