So for your first response, it comes down to the fact ignoring something isn't the same as it not being there. Materially the outcome might be the same but you know, mentally that it's different. That the world is full of levers left to be pushed. It ties into the second point you singled out. Before I get too deep into that I will admit that yes, it is just an argument I'm extrapolating from the complaints others have made. I'm not someone who really gets much out of challenging combat. Combat is mostly a thing I have to do to get to the next story stuff. But I understand that that's not true for everyone. In fact, I don't think I'm really equipped to make a deeper argument for this point because I don't feel it the way others here do.
As for my third and final point, see the first point I made in this post; ignoring something isn't the same as it not being there. The inclusion of all this stuff, whether someone uses it or not, breaks the trust of players with the world. It tells them that Larian doesn't care about creating a solid, believable world and it encourages players to just look at the world not as a breathing world to emotionally invest in, but as a bunch of stats and interactions to mess with. And once that happens, even modding them out doesn't really help, because the illusion's already been broken. I would argue that Larian never really tried to create that illusion in the first place. If someone repainted the walls of your house into a color you don't like, you can ignore it, and it wouldn't fundamentally change anything about your day to day life, but that doesn't make living with it any more pleasant. In this metaphor modding would be repainting the house, but in general I resent how much people lean on modding to fix stuff. Not everyone wants to go through the hassle of finding mods, installing them and then keeping them up to date every time a new patch comes along, or dealing with the potential bugs that mods can lead to. That goes doubly for learning how to mod from scratch themselves.
Fundamentally, I think where you're going wrong is trying to approach this from an angle of logical sense. This isn't, at its core, a logical issue, even though I do think some arguments have fair logic to them (you didn't really address what I said about all these exploits making the design feel careless, for instance. The issue is psychological, emotional. And those are just as valid here because BG3 isn't a purely logical enterprise. It's a game, a piece of art. And I believe that the only way to measure the success or failure of a piece of artis is in how well it rriggers the emotional reactions that the creators want. The emotional reactions that the game, its story and its mechanics inspire are fundamental parts of what will make the game good or not.
