You are absolutely correct, the person trying to convince someone not to let negative posters run him out of his own thread is the most divisive person on the forums. Surely everyone can see that, right? Right?

The more I reflect on "but they can be the main character, so bad", the more mystified I am. I played DOS 2, as a custom character on my first playthrough. I didn't realize until I came here that there was anything "amiss" about that. Of course, I have played lots of CRPGs with party based systems, and the vast majority of them have interesting companions, so when the DOS 2 companions were interesting, I just thought it was par for the course for this kind of game. I had no idea that it somehow adversely affected my experience, because it really didn't. The main game was my character's story, and the companion stories were side quests.

When I play Skyrim these days, it's heavily modded. The vast majority of the mods I use are custom companions, because the mod authors gave them interesting stories, some more so than others, to be sure, and interesting dialog. Some can play music for me, or sing to me, while others can read me books. That is very interesting and provides a better reason to use them than cannon fodder, or as stewards for Hearthfire content. So, when I see that we're going to have interesting companions here as well, I'm not disappointed, but happy. It means, at the very least, that I will have another reason to replay the game, for the different companion interactions, on top of choices in the main plot.

So, I don't buy into the penis envy that is "but they can be the main character". I also don't get the "but Larian needs to give me a reason to play as Tav". There's a whole host of reasons, including different race/class combos, let alone anything that comes up on launch with multiclassing. I neither require, nor desire for Larian to lock me into a specific character or build, which may well mean that I have lots of hours into this game, with multiple completions, before I ever get around to actually playing as one of the Origin characters, assuming I ever do.