I will also say that I disagree with the 'less but better quality' and 'more but lower quality' crowds. I am more in the camp of 'more with high quality'.
I would personally do this by cutting out the origin stories all together. But that is because I have no interest in them. I imagine Larian has to have metrics on how many people played an original character vs. an origin character (does anyone have this data? Maybe it was insanely popular).
I imagine Larian does have that data but apparently the custom single player experience was lacking in DoS2 and is so far the same in BG3, so it's no wonder players would have felt drawn to playing the Origins companions. In essence, the conclusion drawn from the data is fundamentally skewed in the same way Swen was insistent that players want explosions and fireworks, rather than using support spells, according to their interpretation of their own data.
