I don’t know that they needed to go down the route of making everyone the star of the show in order to to make co-op work. If you took the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars then conceivably you could say that Frodo and Luke Skywalker were the stars of the show…but they couldn’t have done what they did without the aid of other ‘stars’.
Some of Larian’s decision making seems to have been driven by accommodating co-op a certain way and the result is that game has suffered for it. What percentage are playing co-op anyway…surely a minority?