This is going to be my first post here, although I watched the discussions for some time at this point but always struggled to actually join. Anyway...
Personally, I take Swen's interview as a sign to temper some expectations as BG3 won't end up perfect; they've clearly underestimated some things, they have much more people working on the game than they had on DOS2 (as far as I understand) and that can easily result in mismanagement, big or small. And this is fine, nothing ever came out perfect. I still think it's probably going to be great but at the same time still troubled at some points.
As someone who didn't actually play BG1/2 I feel like BG3 is under absolutely insane pressure when it comes to expectations - there's a big name attached to the game, then you have general D&D fans, then you have thier own Larian/DOS crowd, etc, and everyone wants it to be a good successor in their own way, most likely in a way that is incompatible to others'. But two dozen years passed since BG1&2, gaming changed a lot, Larian Studios are not early Bioware and they clearly have a specific vision on how they want to do things. And with all this they might as well just focus on their own vision (with adjustments to things that people seem to unanimously loathe) because they won't be able to cater to everyone anyway and they are probably too far in development to drastically change many of the systems or add more. This doesn't mean we don't need some basic systems like reactions to be worked into something better that we have right now though.
