The deliberateness of it particularly gets my goat too. I have read/watched enough media to recognize the little tricks being used to elicit desired emotional reactions from players, and I have played the earlier games enough that I can pretty readily recognize Larian's deviations from those games. It really bothers the hell out of me knowing that their depictions weren't accidental or the result of the team not being familiar with the source material, there would have had to be actual discussions taking place about how to make the characters produce such a visceral dislike in the playerbase that they'd *want* to kill them, so that they'd have a feeling of cathartic triumph after finally vanquishing them.

You can see similar writing/acting tricks used with other antagonists like Cazador and Lorroakan in the game, the difference being that those aren't existing beloved characters from a franchise that the game is purportedly paying homage to.