I'm consciously reminding myself that I didn't ask this question to argue or convince you of anything, because I don't think you're wrong. I'm interested in broadening my perspectives and understanding my own opinions about these games. I think that personally, with a lot of locations in WotR in particular (It's been years since I played kingmaker) just exploring an area and seeing the story crafted for it is enough of a point for me. Like there's a small village that's not really relevant to any quest or story, it doesn't even have a side quest attatched to it. But it has a story of its own. It's a ruined town that's plagued by undead. Undead that I interpret as being the corpses of the townsfolk. So yeah, the only thing to do there is fight undead, but seeing the place itself is to me a reward on its own because it shows a level of care and consideration for world and setting, it helps get across just what kind of place the worldwound is. Pathfinder isn't the best example of this (I would say that's the pillars of eternity games) but still, I like that it's only point is to exist, that it's not inherently relevant to me and to the plot.
Meanwhile with the ogre encounter, I think that for all the options for how to tackle them, it feels...less impressive fundamentally. You could argue that the point of killing the flaming horse or the demons is to remove threats to your barony/the crusade, same as removing the ogres or the matriarch. And the Spider Matriarch is the same. All the methods you list out, to me still just feel like combat. I don't know about any gem there, and if you hadn't told me about it I'd probably just have avoided the spider in perpetuity because tome it's all just a fight to me, and a tough one that I really hate doing from the one time I got caught up in it. No matter how many ways you can approach the fight, it's still a fight. They don't seem like different solutions to me, anymore than positioning myself in different spots on the map in Pathfinder are different solutions. As for killing a thing that's plaguing the local area...no one's left there. Everyone except the druids are dead or just gone and we don't even really know why.
About 80% of the locations in the case of Kingsmaker, not only that they looked identical, but the only thing they had was a single fight with poor prizes. If they cut them out, the game would be even better because shorter. In the case of WotR it is better, but still many locations are for nothing. The difference is that with BG3 you actually have more than one option.
I don't want to do the work for the developers and imagine something they should do.
