any and all lack of reactivity is for budgetary reasons, unfortunately a lot of which is spent on things that in general matter less to most people like origins and other little features.
Fully agree with that especially since, from what I remember at least, statistics early on in EA already showed that only a small minority actually played origin-specific rather than their own custom Tav or Durge, but a lot of developmental time still went into it.
Even beyond EA stats, their anniversary stats have showed that companion-origins are still very much a minority of player interactions.
Which probably stems from the thing that I dislike most about Larian's Companion-Origins systems... That being you get 90% of their content through just having them as a companion (Even more so when not shackled to PC favoured dialogue interactions)
Having all this work put into getting 10% additional content just seems rather wasteful. Especially when, like you say, such things could be incorporated into their companion interactions.
It's why I prefer Durge style Origins. Whereby it's a unique character that can only be experienced through playing them. (I mean, sure, I dislike the actual Durge character itself but the concept of having an alternate viewpoint for the game is neat. It could even go further and have more drastic story changes for such Origin types. Like, what if in BG3 there was an Origin who WASN'T tadpoled which would have massive impacts on how they would tie into the story and also interact with various mechanics)
Seemingly this is also true for many others. Given that Durge sees significantly more play than other origins (With Tav being far more popular, likely due to how unpleasant the actual Durge character can be)
It's a developmental decision, as you said likely because of budget and focus on other things, and I've just come to terms with that.
I think part of it also comes from the difficulty in doing it properly.
Like, there are many permutations of party compositions. Each one will have different characters making remarks. Then if you want to tie things in organically, there's even more work to make things function (As the default way games do it would be make everyone spout out independent lines in a round robin. Which would be just as jarring as "No-one makes any comments" as they're all ignoring each other. Compared to real conversations where one person might make a comment then another person would react to that comment)
It's one of those things that's awkward with party based RPG's. Even having just a handful of characters can open up a ton of permutations of party compositions, which would impact dialogue interactions. (And of course, due to the limitations of coding, would also result in specific dialogue interactions taking precedent over others based on compositions)
Meanwhile, we're still struggling to get actually good responsiveness from our single player characters and single other character dialogues. Especially when catering for "Blank Slate" characters like Tav whereby they're devoid of any personality so they have to try and make up options to help people impart their own headcanon onto them (Which is an equally impossible task whereby you'd have ridiculous amounts of permutations based on how other people view "Their" character, with equally ridiculous reactions to account for them)
At best, we see things like "Solasta" where each character in the party is involved in dialogues, but the party just acts like a single character with each dialogue option simply making a different party member say their line. It feels more "My whole party is actually involved in the conversation" but it's as equally deep and nuanced as "Only main character speaks and everyone else stands around like a cardboard cutout".
In general, we're still stuck with very basic conversation systems. Which, much like other systems (I.e. Relationships) are being neglected in favour of fluff like graphical settings in terms of development and advancement - Which is a trend across the industry as a whole and not just RPG's (There really has been absolutely zero interest in anything other than "Make everything pretty and high res and stuff in new graphical settings like ray tracing" for the past couple of decades)
