To Bomor, the issue is/was that you could not properly access any elements of their character sheets – which meant that if you accidentally dragged an ability or spell off their bar, you didn't have any way of putting it back again.

But to answer LukasPrism:

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

Yep, you can absolutely still take all of their equipment,

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

And empty their inventories.

Also worth noting:

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

They haven't actually disabled the other character's panels, or turned them into self-contained companions, or anything like that. They've just hacked in a script line that automatically shuts the window again if you open it, and opens the inspection window instead if you try to open one directly. You can still get a look at it in game right now, if you want, and though you can't get it to stay open long enough to change anything, the ability to do so hasn't actually been disabled at all.

On that note I'll also point out the situation with the hot bars:

They haven't actually locked the other character's hot bars. All they've done is pasted in a custom filter panel Over the existing hot bar; like there's always a filter view up – it's not even aligned properly and you can still see their actual hot bar behind it:

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

I can even drag the dividers around on the real hot bar, behind the filter:

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

This is a quick, dirty hack job that is the absolute minimum-effort solution. At this point, the only thing that their changes to the companions in the intro has done is stopped our ability to pick Shadowheart's spells (and this hasn't been disabled - there just isn't enough to time between clicking over to her and clicking a spell, to change something before the window shuts itself). Everything else – changing equipment, stripping inventories, etc., is all still very easy to do using just UI that the game presents to us. So what's the actual goal here? What's the purpose?