I see your point about providing enough to work with for the player, which is a fair goal for it to have, but from a story perspective it still ends up ringing false for me. I find the guardian to generally be better because while he's still obvious, he's in my opinion less obvious than Daisy who does everything short of coming right out and saying she's evil and wants bad things for you. From a roleplaying perspective, I think Daisy would have deterred characters from using the tadpole more than she tempted any of them. Certainly I think that's true for Tavs. And frankly the reactivity was cool but even in EA it seems obvious in hindsight that they wanted you to use the tadpoles. Since you got nothing if you never used them, no hint at anything at all. I would say that the Guardian appearing initially no matter what is better on that front since noow you can't potentially miss a significant aspect of the story entirely. I agree that the Balduran all along twist was dumb, but also I think at this point that the main plot was never going to hold up, the rewrite just took an already weak foundation and made it worse. I think just based on Larian's instincts and apparent interests, the mess we have now was inevitable. What we had before wasn't better, we just only saw the part before the reveal that it was bad. We jsut saw the setup, I'm sure iif during EA we started with the dream guardian, we would have been just as on board with it because we couldn't see the payoff for the setup.We'd have eagerly been speculating about the battle we saw, the identity of the guardien, etc. It was just a matter of which flavor of disappointing storyline we got.