Why would you want your party unchained by default?
So you can move each character across the map individually, sounds like a step backwards...IMO
Quick chain/un-chain entire party would be nice however
party formations I would also like to see,
My suggestion for this would be to provide a chain / unchain hotkey. Let me press 1 hotkey to select all my characters for movement, and let me press the same hotkey to deselect that let me move them individually with the Function keys for quick selection. Drag select would be great, but I doubt they'll make bigger changes like this before the game is released.
The chaining mechanic is simply a worse interface that drag selecting your party and moving the selected characters where you want them. Just count the number of steps you have do to with a chain system vs a traditional drag select system. I think part of the difficulty Larian has is that drag select works fine in an overhead or isometric view, but not so well in a 3D over the shoulder view (kind of like how NWN had 1 companion on auto-follow) and they've got both camera angles.
As an example of why it's bad, in one fight I wanted to have Astarion sneak to the top of a rock and initiate the fight while my other two characters hid to the side of the rock, ready to engage. So I unchain him (1 long unchain), then click him to the rock. Then I send my other two characters to the side (2nd action). Halfway there I realize I should probably send a melee character to Astarion in case the enemy climbs the rock in front of him, so I click my melee character over. But my third character follows her and either way I have to long unchain them and send them to Astarion. Now I can finally send me third character to the side to engage from behind.
In general, Larian's chain mechanic gets clunkier and clunkier the larger your party is. The unchain mechanic takes longer than a drag or a hotkey select and sometimes you mess up and chain people together when you're trying to unchain one from the rest. And since there's no way I know of to move everyone together without rechaining them, you have to spend double the actions that you would in another system.
