I love DA:O too, but I actually liked the characters and character stories in Dragon Age II a little more.
Yeah I have always been very puzzled with many people's reaction to DA2. I found it to be a really good game. I completely agree about how irritating it was to have the level designs being constantly reused. But we also know why that happened, because EA forced Bioware to rush the game out the door. But other than that issue, the game was very good.
I recently replayed that too, and found its biggest problem was with how irritating it was: not the major bits, by which I mean the setting, story, characters were great, the combat
theoretically okay; the irritation started with the re-use of areas. In comparison, the belated ending of Divinity 2 did the claustrophobic feeling really well, everything taking place in Aleroth where you felt confined but the city was interesting and varied and the atmosphere changed significantly from one bit to another. Even the ruined and overrun bits had their own charm, something DA2 lacked.
The "theoretically okay" combat quickly became incredibly annoying with its notorious three-waves-of-abseiling-goons and the worst thing you could do was to increase the difficulty from easy: it didn't make it harder, just just made the irritation more protracted.
But mostly it was the small stuff. The designs and visuals looked ugly and uglier, they were angular and jarring in the same way as Half Life 2, which was like that deliberately, to create unease. But DA2 felt like it was trying to be edgy. The soundtrack was horrible and rather than creating an atmosphere it just pissed me off. I turned off the music and it improved my experience a lot. What I couldn't turn off were minor sound effects, even the weird metallic "neh-eh-eh-eh" you got when opening the menu sometimes felt enough to make me want to throw my computer out the window.
In short, a good game marred by terrible presentation.
