The characters in DAII were the best written in the series to me, better on average than in Mass Effect I'd go so far as to say, they all have a 'fatal flaw' that undoes them but which they strive to overcome, very Romantic, and unlike in most wish fulfillment rpg stories, not all of them succeed. I wish more games had the guts to do that to you.
Maybe I'm a pragmatist, but I'm of the unpopular opinion that obligatory "character flaw" is very overrated. I'm not advocating for Mary Sues, of course, but not every character needs internal struggles, dark past, a crippling flaw, psychological trauma, emotional drama etc. etc. I personally like strong (psychologically) characters that aren't prone to brooding and drama. Or just... fun characters.
There's nothing necessarily pragmatic about being a well adjusted individual :p, But I agree with you for the most part, as a fan of comics the grimdark 90s which was so 'hardcore' was insufferable to go through, but I think a distinction should be made between stories involving trauma and stories that wallow in it, all stories are about travelling from point A to point B in order to complete a quest. If your character arcs don't feed into the overall narrative then it's as you say, a sort of writerly onanism, but if everything is thematically linked around these motifs then it should enrich it.
Related to this was the personality system that Hawke had, which depending on your responses to situations, would set Hawke's personallity from serious, aggressive, or flippant. I personally thought this was a good compromise in the era of voiced protagonist and wish it was expanded upon instead of paired down. You could make a Hawke who didn't have time for this emo shit or avoided it with humor, and for the most part they didn't shower you with numbers and confetti to let you know what sort of person on the Renegade/Paragon binary you were working towards like ME and KotOR did, making you more liable to actually 'roleplay' instead of gamifying morality.
Oh, I'm not saying no stories should even involve any kind of drama - but rather that writers shouldn't see it as a "necessary for good writing" checkbox. Same with character development - it's widely believed that if "a character is the same as it was in the beginning of the story, it's bad writing". With which I completely disagree. (Of course, there's also the matter of the definition of "character development". I'm not saying characters should learn absolutely nothing from their experiences - but some great shift in personality/views should be reserved for the stories where it actually has merit.)
I do like stories which have subtle thematic connections between the main characters. Though it's hit or miss for me when it comes to the execution - as much as I love Brandon Sanderson's work and The Stormlight Archive in general - I can't stand the ridiculous amounts of emotional drama and trauma all the protagonists go through. It's very clearly the theme of the series (when it comes to main characters), but it's something I suffer through while rolling my eyes every time a character has a mental breakdown (read: often). Especially disappointing that the author had previously written about how it's not fun to read such stuff. (To paraphrase in short.)
I did have my Hawke sarcastic. But the dialogue wheel was a huge step back, along with voiced protagonist. It kind of worked for Hawke since it was "half-origin" (so to speak), but I still found most of the "nice" and "aggresive" options quite caricatural. Of course, it's still better than to only have "good" and "evil" choices...
