It's ok to not care at all about statistics and monsters being true to the rule, but ultimately my feeling is if that is your take (and it's valid) then using the D&D license doesn't really matter for you. As it stands I think the monsters per rules are more interesting than what Larian is doing and more appropriate to the setting. In a progression RPG I think trying to make the prologue more epic by introducing nerfed version of more impressive monster is a bad idea. With nerfed here I mean: no lore reason for them to be weaker and having the same name as P&P enemies but missing abilities. Crippled, diseased or baby versions of the same monsters would work better.
As for WotR I have written it before and I'll likely do so again - for me it is the best RPG since at least PoE 2: Deadfire and probably longer than that. I don't really see any chance for BG 3 to even come close to it in my esteem at the moment. WotR is a game with serious flaws, and yes, I agree the map random encounters are one of them. But it's a tiny part of a game that reaches heights in other areas that the vast majority of other RPGs don't even approximate. Flawed masterpieces are just preferable to polished standard fare.
For what's it worth I am pretty ambivalent about Kingmaker, so it's not even about RtWP, Pathfinder or being an Owlcat fan for me.
WoTR has too many problems to be called a masterpiece. The game for the premiere was in an extremely terrible condition. Sometimes it couldn't even be completed (demon, bitch). At some point I had to basically start the whole act all over again. It's good that it happened in the second act, and not later, because I probably wouldn't have finished the game. Some classes did not work (recently when I played it has not changed completely). All descriptions were literally copied from the pnp, although they worked completely different in the game. I don't want to write about the fact that some mythical paths did not work properly (I wonder if they finally fixed the golden dragon). Which by no means should have happened considering it's the main feature. Of course, the chance is that they will eventually fix it, but I doubt that in WoTR you can find a lot of serious bugs already present from Kingsmaker. The first two acts are really great but then a huge drop in quality starts to show up. Sometimes it feels like a completely different game.
The game has problems with the fights design from the very beginning. I have the impression that the developers literally do not understand the concept of cr. There are a lot of battles in the game that a team on a low level should never have to fight. Of course, it would be a smaller problem if the monster skills were implemented as they are in the pnp, but of course they also had to overdo it here. I don't know why, but the devs just love enemies with high DC who take the whole team out. Of course, they are often skills without protection or it is only available from a much higher level. These skills are balanced by the player being immune to the next ones after they expire. Of course, they completely forgot about the implementation of the last part, which means that many enemies will be able to literally stun lock the whole party forever. I wrote about random encounters before. It is simply an accumulation of the remaining combat issues raised to the power of not being buffed and being surrounded. The game starts dropping a lot from act 3. There is absolutely nothing in the game on the level of the Battle of Drezen.
While act 3 is still quite nice, not counting the dubious project of battles, it only gets worse. Act 4 introduces probably the worst navigable city in history. Here again, the rather interesting idea of a changing environment has been overused. None of the creators thought that while it looks great the first time, it becomes irritating and frustrating when you have to cover the same route over and over again. Was it so difficult to design this location so that it would change once or at the moment of proper progress? Finally we end act 4 and come to act 5 which is just weak. I would compare it at best to Arx in DoS2 (base version). The act is clearly incomplete. And the Iz battle itself and the dungeon lately are pretty bad. Honestly, I was expecting something on the Drezen level. In act 5 there is also one of the worst dungeons in crpg games, Enigma. I don't feel like writing about the crusade system. This is another unnecessary adding to the game and above all a boring system. If, instead of wasting time, they had concentrated on completing Act 5 and fixing bugs, it would have been better. This is one of those pieces where the game would gain a lot, if it had just been cut.
This is where I will end because I have quite a long post anyway.
