For me if it is space & exploration vs strong plot, quests & characters, I always pick strong plot, quests & characters!
I'm absolutely in the same camp.
Still I find the OP and many more posts like this on the forum to be incredibly valuable and informative, as they show how flaws and glitches in the game mechanics can leak into storytelling by allowing for nonsensical actions/events or by breaking immersion.
The problem here is this: if a game does not feature significant exploration, then the absence of mechanisms that account for its presence is no problem. If we arrived at Waukeen's Rest and had no motivation to go somewhere else and explore before we deal with the fire, the problem with temporal consistency would not exist, and the "long rest clock" would work since nobody stays here standing around for an hour to watch the house burn down (though it would be cool if that was possible. And it can't be made possible without in-world time). If BG3 was just story and no exploration, things would work just fine as they are. That would, however, also mean that there are no stories we could find or not find, depending on where we go. Everything would be hooked to the main plot. A perfectly valid design, and possibly better for storytelling overall, but not what we expect from these games, right?
Meanwhile, if a game has significant exploration *and* a story that needs to be accounted for, then the game must do its part to deal with the inevitable priority clashes.
