I've said before that Larian seems yo have very little capacity for restraint. They felt the need to take everything to its absolute limit in a way that was not good for the game as a whole. There's a reason you sacrifice things in a game or story, even stuff that's good. Sometimes you have to pare down extraneous plots and systems in order to make the stuff that's really important truly shine, and Larian seemingly didn't do that until they were forced, seemingly. They tried to do everything all the time and jam in every idea they thought of, to the detriment of the whole.
I just don't think you can have the degree of freedom and flexibility they promised as well as a deep, complex epic story. The story they have now has to function when everybody save three or four people can be killed at any point in the process, that is not a framework for a functional, satisfying epic narrative. Imagine if Larian hadn't insisted on us being able to solve random quests by like, pickpocketing an NPC and instead really focused on developing good and Evil choices for the main plot, focused on the story around the tadpole.
Or look at Shadowheart. What does Shar have to do with this whole plot? It's not important enough to come up at all before the conclusion of Shadowheart's plot, certainly. But how could it, when you can kill shadowheart or drive her away. And the gith? They shod be super important, but you can kill Lae'zel and skip the creche entirely. None of this stuff that the companions are attached to can matter because they wanted to give us the freedom to skip it. So the story always was going to be choppy and disjointed. To use DA: Inquisition as an example, you will always have at least 4 particular companions with you, and a host of unkillable supporting characters, so they can contribute to the backbone of the plot. We don't have that for BG3 and it suffers for that.
