I'll bet you Larian has data that says otherwise. [...]
Exactly where would they get such data from?
They have data from DOS:2 regarding how many people played an Origin character versus a Custom character, but I’m not sure how representative that is ...
As you suggested, one must be very careful about using data from D:OS2. One reason is that playing with a Custom Character in D:OS2 was a notoriously sub-optimal choice : you would get to miss story-content exclusive to the Origin Characters and get nothing for it in return (and from a gameplay perspective, it was the same, since you could build every character the way you wanted).
Say you are selling salads and you offer the option to have them accompanied by either warm and crispy white bread, or stale and borderline mouldy whole bread (advertised as such), you shouldn't be surprised if your data shows that people predominantly ask for the white bread. (As an aside, if you were to give the warm and crispy white bread to half the customers, and the stale and borderline mouldy whole bread to the other half (randomly), you shouldn't be surprised to observe that people given the whole bread didn't finish it.)
Does that mean that people prefer white bread to whole bread ? I would certainly not say your data allows to conclude that.
Of course, the above remark has been made dozens of times already. And it is just common sense. I just felt it was worth recalling.
