Personally, I don't agree that the Pathfinder series is some remarkably good RPG, there were much better titles. Both the first and the second game have a lot of problems that significantly reduce the quality of production I think I'll start with the first game first, because here I have the most problems. Some of the accusations are repeated for both WotR and Kingsmaker because in many cases Owlcat simply fails to learn from mistakes.
I'll start with the plot. The game has a terrible pace problem. The first act is probably the most boring of all. The second act doesn't get much better until about halfway through the act. That's when the story begins to take off. Then there's a great act three and a nice act four. Unfortunately, then a huge decline in the game begins. Act 5 is a huge drop in quality and then the worst dungeon I have ever seen in a games. Find me a person who managed to complete the last dungeon in Kingsmaker without spending a few hours there or by following the guide.
The game also has a huge problem with the level of difficulty. When playing hard, the first act is difficult and then the difficulty level drops head over heels to a level where the fights could as well be fought automatically in the middle of act 2. Then in the last dungeon the game decides to increase the difficulty level by about 500%
Another problem for me is managing the kingdom. The mechanics are so good that even the developers themselves probably did not believe in its success and gave the option to turn it off completely (not that it was somehow thoughtful and did not cause any problems with the game). The management itself is just boring. From time to time, there are cards to which you should assign a certain advisor and then wait a few days for the dice to be rolled. And that is one of the problems, the mechanics are completely rng based. It practically doesn't matter who you choose (not counting the modifiers you can unlock), ultimately your success will be determined by rng. This gets annoying later in the game where the chances of success are often 50-60%. Here comes another problem. The game is so badly designed that the player can literally lose all advisors to one of the positions, which will result in a slow but practically inevitable defeat. This has been reduced somewhat with the mercenary's ability to assign a mercenary, but due to the very high penalty to success, most likely he will have around 30% or less to success. Another (less) annoying problem is that oftentimes you just have to spam the skip a day button for several months. At one point I had to literally skip 10 months of the game in order to even be able to push the story further. It was not a very interesting activity. Apparently, you cannot skip days for auto management (I didn't play myself), but if it really is, it must be a very pleasant time of several dozen minutes of waiting.
Despite the fact that a long time has passed since the premiere, there are still some serious bugs. Fortunately, I only came across single gamebreaking and I only had to go back 3 hours. Of course, this applies to the PC version, in the case of the console version, it is supposedly still barely playable.
I won't write much about companions, some of them are well-written, and quite the opposite, but it's mainly a matter of taste. What I don't like is "talking" (although it's hard to call it that) while resting. This is literally a two-sentence exchange. What's worse, in some cases they are so general that they could as well be assigned to several characters. There are a few more problems but to address them I would have to use some pretty powerful spoilers.
Of these smaller things, the game completely ignores the player's race or class. There is also the issue of alignment, or rather the question of dubious implementation or writing of Owlcat, but this will be referred to more in the case of WotR.
Overall, this is quite a lot to complain about, but I still enjoyed the game until I got to the last main dungeon. Then the flustration started. In general, the game would benefit if they cut the entire thread of kingdom management out of it and shortened the game by about 10 hours. Such systems don't work well in rpg games and let's make a deal, if people wanted to play a kingdom management game, they would play crusader's kings. At least I finished this game unlike PoE1 which I abandoned at the very end of the game.
Due to the fact that I got quite a long post, I will refer to WotR later.
I think your comments are fair on pathfinder kingmaker. Personally hated the convoluted kingdom management, in fact it drove me batty. Owlcat has done alot to remedy this in WotR as it is rewarding and incentivizes map combat etc. While I personally didn't find too many bugs, both pathfinder games are not without their issues. This however it is massively overshadowed by what the games do right, this is of course my opinion.
Companions are hit and miss in any game simply because the writers have to build interesting personas for as many people/players as possible. That being said I do find pathfinder companions a bit cheesy but it is the fact they don't try to be "real" is why I can overlook it. BG3 the characters try to be "real" but come off worse (imo) because of it. To be grounded in reality and have fantastical backstories while living though something equally fantastical and x 5 companions is somewhat ridiculous.
I suppose it all come down to a matter of taste. My nostalgia for games like BG1&2 are not comparing it to todays games, it is more time for time. Yes BG1&2 have aged badly but the year they were developed they were basically 10/10 compared to what was around at the time. People in my opinion want a BG3 to reflect what BG1&2 did in 2000ish they don't want pure 5e or DOS2-2 they simply want a BG game built on the foundations of a known working format suitable for a AAA game in 2022. Larian have broken away from immersion/rpg and gone for something inbetween arcade 5eish combat in a lifeless and unchanging DOS2 simulator.
