Everyone is going to have unique tastes regarding companions. Its accurately accessed.
I think you will always have people with positive and negative reviews of game play change to a game style. Personally I like the turn based combat mode over the real time action mode its an element that is lacking enough representation in games today the games that do have it and have developed a huge following usually never follow up on it so it dies out. (xcom really good example of this - though not the same genera of game).
Larion did a great job with making a turn based game feel good even in early access. Are there areas that could be better sure but its also early access so there will be general fixes for a lot of it. So far as a company they have shown actively that they listen to the people while keeping true to what they have promised and provided a great early access release. Hopefully with more to come soon.
Fleshed out story well its early access. Companions again early access all we are seeing right now is the origins characters which there could even be more added there honestly id like to see all 12 classes appear in origins characters.
As for too weird or plain. The origins characters have to feel unique a little bit other wise why would you care to use them over merc characters once the feature is added having them be slightly unique is what makes them special in ways. I personally dislike gale currently the most because he doesn't feel unique enough why not just play any other mage character instead. The game is still a year off full launch there are lots of ways that larion can and is probably working on expanding this. Most likely we will see more companions / origin characters after the classes start appearing as that is going to be the biggest balance point in early access before tuning things.
BG2 you can find games similar to that everywhere what larion is doing is expanding the table top to a pc and so far its good. A lot of the negatives actually sound like people not really paying attention outside that.
Though I am sure you probably have seen a lot of posts about 6 characters I think its the most common post I have come accross in relation to bg 2.
