Speaking of flavor, I'm way ,WAAAY more fond of games that push the pretense of being actually "an adventurer doing adventurous things" going with that "pen & paper feel" over the ones that make everything immediately convenient and overly explicit because "lul it's just a videogame".
The "annoyance" of having to identify items otherwise their powers will remain unused? Of swimming in crap but not having an easy and convenient instant fast travel out of bad spot? Of having to consider carefully when and how much to rest because there are dangers to avoid and/or deadlines to meet? Yes please.
Also, I can't absolutely stand excessively steep power curves (i.e. the typical "you start with 28HP and end with 999" of your average JRPG) and randomized itemization.
I've been playing this genre for over 30 years at this point and I have not a shadow of a doubt that I'll ALWAYS take a limited (but ideally generous) selection of unique items over being drowned in randomly generated crap at every hour of any day until the day I'll die.
I feel the same way. 'Adventurer doing adventurous things' can be extremely compelling if done right. Problem is, most are very bad at it. I still tend to favor those kinds of narratives over those that try to present themselves as epic and philosophical in scope, mostly because the latter tends to have a very bad tendency of dumping tons of exposition on you and trying to build things up, only to end up absolutely failing flat on the delivery towards the end (along with my other major pet peeve, constantly dangling certain plot threads out of reach as a sequel hook - I'm looking at YOU, PoE and Dragon Age). They typically tend to try to weave most of the narrative around the player character's existence too, while the former instead goes for more subtle overall world building.
Granted, a good mix of both is preferable, but very difficult to pull off. I think the only example of a game containing a great balance of both that I can think of was DA2, which also went for the very aytpical 'life in a big city over several years' plot structure. Sadly the game was rushed out the door and the actual gameplay wasn't up to par, so the narrative value of that game has been sadly forgotten or ignored as a result.
Something like this is also why I've always favored Kingmaker's narrative over, say, the PoE series. And WotR is even better than Kingmaker in that regard. Even if the actual plot itself is about as epic as you can get, the companion writing and overall pacing still has that strong adventure feel to offset it. My faith in how the companions are written and presented is now so high that I'm confident it's going to set a new standard in regards to how companions are designed/written for cRPGs that's going to be extremely difficult to top. The sheer quality is absurd for how many party members there are (10 so far, not counting any 'secret' party members/those locked behind specific mythic paths).