I don't get the problem with barrels.
Larian hasn't a gun pointed to a player's head forcing them to use said item. On of my habits is that I'm a hoarder, I take all the objects I find around to sell them, to decor the base of my characters, to try combining them, no matter the reason I collect items, I search any chest, any container and take the stuff they have in.
A barrel has a weight that consumes room in my inventory so I don't collect them.
Also I'm not a strategist, I'm more akin to the "lets grind experience and grow up the characters so that I can overpower the bosses" and usually (unless a quest explicitily asks for a stealth run or, like the Goblin bosses one, asks for a solution that doesn't end in a massacre) I attack frontaly (yes, not the best way to handle a fight but that's how I play) so I'm careful not to blow up the barrels due to the fact that those can heavily injure my party (indeed sometimes I am a victim of their usefullness because the enemies blown them up, usually killing Gale
), also barrels can destroy my precioussss items so I decided not to use them (specially since I got aware that with a little patience i can grow up my party enough to overpower bosses).
Did the game force to use them I would agree that they are a problem. But the game doesn't force anyone to use them (like the game doesn't force to use heights, or to save just before a picopocket or a lockpicking or before any dialogue, or choice) that's something that relies on the player side, I'm weak against temptations (really weak) still I'm able not to do some things the game let me the choice whether to do or not (in my current run I lost Astarion because I made a dialogue choice, and subsequently I decided not to reload no matter how I like the pale elf, and I do love that companion).
On the Baldur's Gate, I'm at my umpteenth attempt to finish it, and again I'm fighting with the will to abbandon it. Aside from the graphics I find the fights chaotic, the magic side almost unuseful at the lower levels, ridiculously annoying the way camps and rest are handled (the party is supposed to be composed of adventurers, people that would have an eye for a place to rest without fear of being attacked, and the lack of a fast travel that doesn't imply the need to reach the border of the map lack of any logic).
Maybe is because I was used to daggerfall, morrowind, oblivion (that is bethesda games before the fall that are Skyrim and The elder scrolls online) but I don't feel engaged at all by the BG I and II (an I have to concess that I like BG III for the graphics, cinematics, the not so subtle echoes of the Original Sin, than for the D n D mechanisms).
