I also really want shorter race romance options. And potential party members, but they don’t even need to go together. I’d have appreciated it if we had the opportunity to build romances with some other NPCs too. They wouldn’t even need to be full-fledged romances like those with companions, just enough to act as hooks for our imagination and give our characters for whom the existing romance options aren’t doing it some choices. And given how a character like Barcus reappears throughout the story, I don’t think he in particular needs to join the party in order to act as a LI for my deep gnome rogue who totally has a crush on him
(Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t want Barcus in the party as an artificer companion, too!)
As a vaguely relevant aside, my thinking on this topic is partly influenced by Dragon Age: Origins, where there was, for example, the option for a female dwarf noble to have a romance subplot with her second in command, Gorim. And while it didn’t have much content, and wasn’t a very happy story, it worked for my character far better than any of the full romances.
