Or, maybe it was just too much. The game is so big is even hard to tell sometimes what's a bug and what's a feature because there is so much you can do/so many different ways things can go.
I just wanted to return to this comment after giving it some thought. This could be the reason, too. Anyone who played EA knows how odd the interactions could be upon long resting, with sections playing out of sequence or skipping over important elements.
If Daisy was a more involved character, and
if there were more options such as refusing illithid powers versus accepting them, then that could be a huge issue given it'd be dependent on long resting to make sense of it. I'm no DnD expert, I've never played 5E, but I was generally not needing to long rest often on normal difficulty and, by Act 2, I was outright making myself long rest so as not to miss anything.
In that sense, stripping out the more complex character for a more simple one that operates much more under the assumption that the player will accept their help and therefore powers, makes sense. It's one less variable to track, one less event to risk getting stuck in the long rest queue. And I know from my playthrough recently, I was getting events what felt well out of sequence (such as Lae'zel confronting Shadowheart about the Prism... after we went to the creche, where it's very obviously supposed to happen before you know it's a Gith artifact and before it's ended up in your possession.) One of the biggest disappointments I had with release was that the long rest event system was still so janky.
This is pretty much what happened to Raphael, for example. He used to walk into your camp one long rest and do his spiel. Now, he just... pops out of nowhere at a few locations (the harper cache near the grove, the broken bridge north of the village, and I think the path south out of the village) basically to ensure you meet him before the end of Act 1. Of course, this is strange because it does not appear that he can actually do anything with Gale now, and it appears to be a way of giving you an ally who can break you out of Gut's cell (if you haven't met the Guardian who will otherwise do it.)
From what I read half of the city in BG3 was cut, together with quests and endings. Would be very disappointing if that is true.
If there were substantial changes to the game's narrative and tone, then I'd definitely assume that's part of the reason why the endings are so rough. I'm not sure the inner city was cut, but there's definitely
something strange there with how you can't go into the inner city because the Brain is apparently there... only for it to be deep within the undercity.
