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.
It could be a long post again I wouldn't say that they actually did their homework in kingdom management. Of course, on the plus side, they removed rng as well as automatic failure. Theoretically, you can still lose this campaign, but you have to do it on purpose or have a bug that at the beginning of act 5, the enemy's army automatically attacks Drezen as soon as you enter the map and you automatically lose (I'm not sure if they fixed it). The fights themselves are not very interesting. He prayed that you would choose a mage hero in the beginning, otherwise your army will bleed out with every fight and you will have to skip even more turns to make up for the losses. In the end, you will come across a mage who will kill almost all shooters, if you cannot heal (the first one is already in the second act). If you've chosen a mage congratulations, you've just won the entire crusade. This is not even an exaggeration. I literally didn't lose a single unit throughout the game. The combat mechanics itself is not very interesting, as you'd expect, it's just a worse version of homm 5. If I wanted to play this game, I would just install it. It's hard not to mention that when you select units you literally don't know what they are doing. I don't know why they put wall feats on the units that make the description illegible (they do not matter in the slightest). I really don't need an inferior version. Interestingly, some of the Owlcat team (I don't know how true that is) previously worked as homm 5. Worse is that they implemented the auto crusade mechanics again, as if they did not believe that their mechanics are good (because it is not). Only this time they did it again without any thought. Already in Kingsmaker, setting it to auto options could cause huge problems and one could conclude that they would improve it. Little spoiler: they absolutely didn't. I would say it's even worse. This time the game was able to block you mythic paths (interestingly, it worked for some players). AI just seems to build random buildings
This is another mechanic whose sole purpose is to extend the gameplay (as if the game itself wasn't long enough). I could probably write a long time about why this is a bad mechanic and why Owlcat should stop putting plugs in their games, but I'm afraid then this post will be longer than the full description of the kingsmaker.
