It's so odd. The main character selection still does not seem to work when you might want it to work - when fighting the Gnoll, I had to argue with the Gnoll leader with Lae'zel because Lae landed a melee hit on her, but instead it triggers in situation when you usually do have good control over with whom to start the conversation as in the above examples.
I agree, I’m still frequently getting scenes where the closest character is selected rather than my character. I had a case just tonight where Gale was selected to chat with Auntie Ethel and the brothers at the edge of the swamp, not my character. (Also had multiple cases of this in Act 3.) The promised fix addressing the issue seems to be no fix at all, unfortunately. And it seems to be inconveniencing folks in a disagreeable way, to boot. (Can’t speak to that as my MC is always the party face.) They’ll need to get some more hotfixes out.
