I think they have decent reasons (if a little contrived) for the level 1 thing.
For gale, having his magic constantly sucked and being scorned by the goddess of magic is a big excuse to say he can't do any feat he could do before.
Wyll was getting power directly from his patron right there, she was giving him the victories. And now he has to do things on his own, the pact gave him a route to power he didn't explore before which is essentially level 1.
That being said, it'd be nice to see every character have a picked Deity so that if you multiclass to a holy class, they already have a Deity selected for it, though I'd legitimately argue for Gale to be locked out from holy classes and maybe other characters have something they can't ever do cause of their nature's/backstory. Like Astarion might not ever be able to do holy either cause he's a vampire, or Shadow heart never being able to do druid?
Sure, but I don't think Gale would be able to be a competent wizard at all with all those disadvantages. He's just not companion material if he's that messed up, guy should be stuck at handling beginner magic pretty much forever. Also like I said I don't know how scorned he's meant to be, there's hints that she still watches over him in a caring way iirc.
Wyll is weird because warlocks are weird and it's never properly explained how they get their power in any sort of consistent manner. Sometimes they draw from the relevant planes, sometimes they're taught secrets, sometimes they draw from their patron, it's pretty poorly written overall and makes it pretty impossible to judge Wyll either way. He either makes some sense or makes zero sense at all, depending on what warlock interpretation you're using.
I do agree with you they have some reasons for it, but I think it being so contrived is a big issue for me at least, and it'll just get worse the more examples we need to accept.
I mean, BG3 and DoS2 handle it worse than Origins and 2, since in those games you actually started with young people as companions and only got to meet the more experienced ones after a few levels, but Inquisition is basically the same as far as this goes, what with the first companions being a Dragonslayer, a lvl 20 bard, and bald wolf.
Yeah hard agree on that, Inquisition was pretty bad with this. Thought i guess you could argue you start at a stronger point? You're pretty impressive pretty quickly in that game, and Solas has his own weird stuff going on that makes him kind of excusable. Varric is out of place, but I'm like 90% sure Varric being so out of place in combat in general is an in joke at bioware lol, guy's primarily an author and he keeps up just fine with all these elite career fighters.
