If the your argument is "more companions are better because the writing of the ones we got sucks" I disagree. Adding more bland and devoid of character companions will not solve the issue. And you do have the mercenaries system if that is what you're after
If companions didn't need to be developed to the point where they are fully fledged protagonists then it probably would be a lot more economical to make more than the absolute barest minimum.
I dare anyone to argue that companions in the old games didn't have personality. They did, even if it wasn't hammered home with endless dialogue and looooooong quest lines and cinematics. Mazzy with her family problem and that Slums encounter, Minsc having to save his witch in BG1 and really just being Minsc in game 2, Keldorn with his family issues, Cernd with the baby trouble, Jan with his family problem, Nalia with her marriage issue... Not exactly long quests, but enough to give the character a bit of stage time. And that really is enough.
The problem isn't simply that Larian's origin characters are badly written and their dialogues are triggering inconsistently and out of order, it's that Larian is making all companions be playable protagonists with all the bells and whistles, instead of just making companions fot the player-made protagonist. This scales up the cost of each companion and if DOS2 is a template, which it appears to be, then there will literally be less content in the game if you make your own character.
We will not be able to rotate party members beyond Act1, presumably, and we cannot complete quest lines in Act 1, so with a self-made character the player has access to three companion quest lines, and if playing an Origin pregen there will be four. Add to this all the interludes and personal thoughts and presumably chat options for being a special Larian-designed pregen that probably won't be available for anything the player makes.
