As with most of your posts, I find myself nodding the whole time as I read through it. There is definitely an art to using gathered data along with qualitative sources to understand what is going on, and I think they may be learning a lot of the wrong lessons from what they are seeing.
You touched on this a little bit, but regarding buffs and debuffs in particular, their appeal really relies on understanding what they are doing and how they benefit the player. It might just be that we're early in EA and Larian hasn't added this part yet, but I don't think they're doing a very good job of teaching players how the underlying system works - they obscure bonuses and DCs in dialog skill checks; they don't explain how attack vs AC or save vs DC works; you can see the rolls in the combat log if you go looking, but to someone who isn't familiar with the system it doesn't explain anything. If people don't understand what a buff/debuff is doing to the underlying system, they aren't going to know when it is valuable, and so it's rarely going to be as appealing as something that just does damage (a fairly obvious objective that most players can understand intuitively). If players think that buffs/debuffs are boring, it is because Larian hasn't done a good job of explaining why/when they are powerful.
