Disagreeing a little here. Astarion's not gay (he seduced my female tiefling pretty fast), and is very likely evil given his reaction to some choices. He complains about being good if you save the tieflings. Shadowheart, while explicitly described in the game as evil, seems rather torn over the issue and expresses guilt over certain evil choices. She follows an evil goddess for personal reasons but is not herself into evil. Wyll is almost certainly good, since he left the party because I wasn't heroic enough.
There's apparently 12 writers, each working on one companion except for two who have two companions. So fourteen in all. They wanted to start us out with the more evil-leaning characters to encourage evil playthroughs and feedback on evil choices since otherwise most players play good.
Their attributes, however, I completely agree with you, they're trash. Shadowheart's mechanical design especially seems very confused.
