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Fane is almost necessary for a whole lot of lore. I played as him in my second playthrough, and never recruited him in the first. In terms of lore, arc, personality, and plot satisfaction, I would rank the companions in highest amount of attention given to the lowest:
1. Fane (VERY Significant to main plot, in every Act.)
2. Ifan (Significant to main plot)
3. Lohse (Like Fane, she is fun and "different" from the other companions)
4. Sebille (Her story climaxes WAY too early, otherwise she'd be higher)
5. Red Prince (He was my Origin character in my first playthrough. His plot is so aggressively tangential to everything happening in the game that it's laughable. A lot of companions have 'tacked on' stories in RPGs, which is basically the rule for a lot of Bioware companions, but in a game where several characters have plots that directly relate to the major events and characters of the game... it's really bad)
6. Beast (In the reverse of Sebille, his story isn't covered that much until near the end of the game. His plot does get good, but it's only near the end.)

GM, I'd advise swapping Beast for Fane before fighting Alexander. Unless you're fine waiting a long time for real payoff on Beast's story. Fane is relevant in every Act.

Edit: If Sebille's plot didn't just... stop, I would place her between Fane and Ifan.

How is Ifan relevant to the main plot? I mean don't spoil it for GM but if you can explain this in 2-3 sentences and put it under "spoiler" brackets I would be glad. Cause god knows for me he felt like the most irrelevant person in the entire game.

MAJOR MAJOR DOS2 Spoilers.
Edit: Non-spoiler summary: Fane and Ifan are like the Morrigan and Alistair of DOS2 in terms of plot relevance.

Another peculiar aspect of Divinity OS2 is that the main story, or its focus, can change depending on your party composition or choice of Origin. When I did my first playthrough without Fane, so that part of the game was more like a twist rather than its focus. My party was concerned with the plight of their respective peoples/races , while in my second playthrough, a Fane Origin so the playthrough's companion/origin story was more like a backstory to the main plot. If that makes sense.

When you say mechanical interaction, do you mean basically 'fiddling around with stuff in the game world?' Because I think that is exactly why I bounced off of D:OS2 the way I did, so quickly. I just felt this constant, nagging low level anxiety that I was always missing something, that I wasn't interacting with things right, that if I messed around the wrong way, or didn't mess around enough, I would miss things and lock myself out of stuff, and I just could not handle that for more than a couple hours of gameplay. I just always felt lost and unsure what to do next, because it felt as though I couldn't fully predict the consequences of anything. THAT'S the feeling I've been failing to articulate all these years! Thank you!

BG3 doesn't eliicit as much of that, but it's still kind of there.

The thing about Ifan is that I feel like he was originally intended to be the canonical main character. He doesn't seem to really have an involved personal main quest like many of the other characters do, but that's because he has links to the main antagonists (meaning merely progressing through the game's critical path -IS- his personal arc), while everyone else save for Fane are mainly linked to side plots/antagonists instead. You can see this with how he's generally presented front and center in promotional material for the game too, even though he's canonically an archer.

Fane was a Kickstarter companion created by a guest writer, and from the community's point of view, he has a strong claim for canonical main character position since he basically represents the entire background plot of the game.

I've been getting the same vibe so far, that Ifan is maybe the true MC

And I would like Larian to once again hire this freelance writer. Fane was great.

Tbh, we need to keep in mind that the game was DESIGNED with the Origin System in mind, with it probably being used as a base assumption for most playthroughs. I think Ifan is the male MC Origin, Sebille is the female MC Origin (except for one small problem late), Fane is an MC Origin because of other reasons, and the other three are Origins with their own unique takes on the world and its lore, but not necessarily bound to the main plot.

I played D:OS2 about 10 Times, with all characteres as leader. D:OS2 is the best RPG I play.

My wish would be to play some of the old Ultima games (Ultima5, 6,7) with the D:OS2 engine.
Or just the old Divinities again with the D:OS2 engine.

Finally got the boat to take me away. So, I think I finished Act 1?

Before leaving Act 1, I decided to offload a lot of inventory. Why? I continued to find SO much more useless junk on the ship. I was sick of it. So I got rid of a good portion of it. It took me a long time. SO much item management.

And then, after all was said and done, I saw that my hotbars were all jacked up. All the time I spent organizing them was thrown out the window after managing my items and selling them and getting new skills from vendors. Sigh. It's a mess.

And BG3 is doing the same thing. I can't stress this enough. PLEASE fix this, Larian. PLEASE do not do this for BG3. Make item management and hotbar slots more intelligent and less a pain in the royal butt to manage! SO much unfun time spent messing with it. Drives me freaking nuts.

That said, to avoid just bringing up all the bad stuff, I will say that I'm only mentioning the things that I don't like about the game. Overall, it's been a pretty good game. I wouldn't say that it's hooked me, like BG3 has, but it's good.

Trying to sound as neutral as possible, the writer was Chris Avellone, who is pretty much a celebrity writer in cRPG circles due to his involvement in many of the classic RPGs such as Planescape Torment and the Fallout series. At the moment, he's involved in a sexual harassment scandal with an ex-girlfriend, and the fallout from that appears to have made him quietly blacklisted from any further cRPG projects. Though I haven't heard of anything happening in regards to this recently, after that counter-suit that was filed. Maybe their lawyers told them both to shut up and settle this privately.

Anyway, point being, hiring him back likely isn't an option for now. Not exactly because of the scandal itself, but Larian probably doesn't want any attention from Youtube influencers with nothing better to do arguing that Larian is taking anyone's side in it.

Big oof

I thought he was cleaned ... at least on Bloodlines 2 discord someone said it, i believe. O_o
Since he (and all his work) was terminated there aswell.

That's what I heard as well, but couldn't find anything concrete.

Me neither, i just find pined post on his twitter talking about whole situation, explaining it was all one huge scam against him. :-/
So rumors are all i have ...

Quite sad tho, that damage was allready done anyway ... that man lost lots of job opourtunities bcs of the scandal, no matter how it ended. :-/
This kind of things make me very sad panda.

Of course, one would hope that some due process was/is given, and companies didn't make their decisions lightly.

One would ... but its a naive hope. :-/

It's not exactly a topic I'm particularly willing to dive into, but since I happened to cross and read some stuff about this despise my general disinterest (it was object of an animated discussion in at least a couple of places I followed) I know few details.
First thing first, let's clarify the premise: Avellone was never strictly accused to being guilty of any explicit criminal act. He's not an alleged rapist (that we know of).
Only of being an alcoholic (probably true) and a sleazy flirtatious slimeball around a certain amount of girls (not particularly hard to believe, either, but once again not a criminal offense if certain lines aren't crossed).
Also allegedly a shitty (ex) boyfriend toward a friend of the original accuser.

And to be cleat rather than "cleaned" of the accuses (which is not for twitter to decide or refuse, anyway), let's just say that the whole narrative of him being a predator of young naive girls was put at least a bit into question when some friend of her posted some messages where the gist of it was more or less "I think he's at least interested and I'm trying to bang him pretty hardcore". All this, in all fairness, is antecedent to the time Avellone settled for few months as boyfriend of the other girl, an asian woman known as "Jackie".

Oh, and in a separate circumstance he apparently sent some crass "sexting"/explicit flirting to another woman while drunk. The woman who "denounced" this turned out to be an active amateur porn actress (that made even few videos with James Deen) at the time of these events.
This doesn't give Avellone a free pass to be slimy, for the record, but maybe can give some context of how he may have thought it was a good idea at the time, I guess.

I just played like an hour of DOS 2 this morning. Ugh. All I did was item management and mess with skills. I spoke to Malady and Sir Squirrel and the merchant on the Vengeance. That's it And now my hotbars are all screwed up again.

Sigh. I think the issue with items, weapons and equipment, for me anyway, is there is just too much complexity with all of it for my taste. I have to look at each and every piece of armor for 4 different characters and ask myself "Is this better or worse or worth it?"

In D&D/BG3, at least I can look at armor and say, "Ah. This will increase my AC by 2. Done." I don't have to look at it and say, "Okay... um... this will increase Physical Defense by roughly 15 but potentially lower my Magic Defense by 5, but it'll also give me +1 to Huntsman and 10% Fire Resistance... ah but my current armor has 15% Fire Resistance, so that's actually a decrease... and my current armor also has +1 Pyro, so that will suck to have it removed..."

For EACH and every piece of equipment. It's too much. I REALLY don't want anything like that for BG3. Simple is better. PLEASE don't start making items all convoluted. I want to be able to look at an item and say, "Yes. That's cool. Done." I don't want to have to spend an hour pouring through tons of items trying to figure out what's good and what to sell. I want to play the game, not spend an hour shopping and messing with items.

The same is true for skills. My goodness. At first, I was like, "Yes. Lots of abilities and such. More! More!" But now I'm like, "Holy crap, Batman! There's too many of them. I... I don't know what to do with them all, and my hotbar's a mess."

I don't know. I'm not enjoying this game so much. I'm hoping that now that I've sold most of my crap and such and I'm finally in the new map location, maybe it'll be fun again. Thus far, it hasn't been, to me, what everyone's pumped it up to be. My love for BG3 is the only thing carrying me onward to try to complete the game. Prior to playing BG3, I wouldn't have even gotten as far as I have, to be frankly honest. I'm sorry, Larian. I truly am, but DOS 2 so far is not my idea of a fun video game. I WANT to like it, but I don't. Frankly, BG3 is 1000 times more fun even with all the things I've said need to be fixed and suggestions to make the game more fun.

Don't get me wrong. There are elements of the game that are great, but the stuff that isn't so fun is really taking the wind out of my sails.