Personally, I really like the fact that everyone we meet is a named individual usually with something unique to say rather than loads of generic peasants and townspeople who all have pretty much the same chat, and within reasonable limits am more than happy to forego quantity for quality. I can see it might be tricky to successfully maintain this approach and yet make population centres feel alive and busy enough, though, but I have my fingers crossed Larian will find a way to manage it without compromising this particular aspect of their vision.
Same feeling here. NPCs for the sake of having NPCs lead to games like Daggerfall where everything is a chore to do. Later TES games shifted away from this and proved that only adding less but only meaningful NPCs is the way to go.
