The battlefields in BD were entirely optional; I only visited for the merchants.
Lots of people wanted respawning opponents after Divine Divinity, optional areas and the ability to keep playing after the end of the main plot. It wasn't a majority, but apparently enough to justify an experiment... or it was a requirement from the publisher.
I specifically hoarded skill points because of complaints there were too few, and had no problem at all. While some skills were more divided than they needed to be, having subgroups for skills allows much more customization, and tailoring to specific builds.
Characters do start with skills, based on the character classes chosen for the hero and death knight. Pretty much all stand-alone games start with level 1 characters, even if they were suppose to be more powerful in their backstory (such as Divinity 2).
There were multiple patches while the game was actively being developed.
The DD wastelands were cut back quite a bit from the original plan, due to the publisher setting the release date, leaving it almost entirely hack and slash.
With BD, the final act was done first, so this would not happen again, but unfortunately that put limits on the design of the rest of the game, since changing too much or introducing new mechanics could invalidate the work already completed.
