Do you even need such production values in the first place if they mostly go towards cinematics, and those aren't all that great in the first place?
I reject your notion that it's not "all that great in the first place."
It's exceptionally well done. You can certainly cherry pick the occasional buggy moment, but overall, it's the result of real skill and effort. The success of BG3 speaks for itself, and it's shallow to reduce that success to nothing more than "bear sex." The game succeeded because of the cinematics, the voice acting, and the excellent character writing. Yes, excellent. Those characters came alive for so many people. That doesn't happen with hack writers.
It's fair if it's not to your taste. I think it's remarkably well done. You don't. Let's just call it a no-brainer.
The moment, the very moment you aren't playing a race that uses the standard human physique, it all falls apart. Close-ups of, say, githyanki in different armors are painful to look at with all the clipping. Recycled animations that don't change no matter which race or body or gender you're playing harken back to that one shot of Shepard from ME2 in a dress with legs spread wide. If they were more neutral, it wouldn't be nearly as jarring, but, again, the feminine stride from one of the very first scenes is extremely obviously out of place once you aren't playing a female character.
Expressions and gestures make your character seem like a buffoonish moron no matter whom you are trying to play most of the time - why would a barbarian, or a particularly sadistic Dark Urge be recoiling in fear from, say, the hyenas transforming into gnolls (look at 'em polygons!) after having just recently ripped Gale's arm off?
The camerawork is very subpar compared to, say, Witcher 3, where the Wild Hunt fight scene outside of Kaer Morhen alone is simply plain gorgeous. Here everyone moves with all the grace of a sock puppet, and some moments clearly show that they were done in very different timeframes (Barcus' first dialogue had those very distinct motion-captured animations very similar to how they looked in Dragon Commander ever since he was shown during the very first gameplay reveal).
Romance scenes are laughably bad, too. Stiff, awkward, with, again, poorly placed camera angles. The naked models are so low-detail and devoid of physics that showing them this close is a very questionable decision. Reused animations are even worse here, with, say, male characters' hands not lining up with Minthara's at all, or Karlach outright ignoring anatomy at one point. Haarlep's is just downright painful to look at - if ever there was a "two dolls humping" scene, that one certainly qualifies the most.
Clothes look like they're made of clay and every close-up of, say, Volo feels like something from a decade ago. And so on. And so forth.
All that cinematics budget could have gone into much better areas, is all I am saying, with what the results are like in the end.
