I mean, the fact that the team was burnt out and happy to finally push the game out the door at long last was pretty damn obvious as early as the semi-final EA showcase in Q1 2023, when the game basically took a 180 degree turn and stomped on most things the EA players were trying to steer it towards, marketing towards a quick and short-term reliable shipper- and "average Bioware fan" - customer base who care not about the mechanical background or a deep, impactful storyline - but instead want a glorified dating sim with a flashy presentation.
Like, to this day, I am baffled by the decisions like removing belts and swapping them for the underwear slot which you find no items in the world for until Act 3, just turning crossbows into better bows by not implementing the loading tag, throwing racial ability bonuses away but not allowing for dice roll allocation, screwing up spell distribution with multiclassing so that mixing casters gets out of control all for the sake of it being "fun", not changing the illogical bits of Act 1 whatsoever and not elaborating at all on the Absolute's route, swapping Daisy for the Emperor, going out of control with all the gimmicky magic items instead of reining them the hell in, adding a bunch of characters just for fanservice or to seemingly fill the quotas, never really touching up on the warlock making it one of the most boring classes to play (after the cleric), adding full frontal nudity for whatever reason,...
...this might go on a while. Point being, suddenly going on a rampage with all the smiley interviews and aggressively marketing the game as having the most detailed and inclusive and such character creator and reactivity and the ability to play who you want (which the game barely, if at all, delivers on), and gushing on and on about romances after ~2 years of at least pretending to build up on the game's mechanical core only to throw most of it out the window was very telling. I even asked "who's this game ultimately for?" back then. Welp, it sure ended up with an identity crisis, perhaps the worst case of one in Larian's portfolio.
