meh, i think everyone should enjoy what they want to. i have played literally every single fucking RPG under the sun, since a wee lad, i mean dude... just look at my join date.
and yet my newfound favorite style of RPG comes in turn-based dungeon crawling blobbering. I consider, now, at age 33, that wizardry 1: proving grounds of the mad overlord is a much better desgined RPG than say... well, to pick from your examples: Morrowind.
see, the problem here is that you're conflating liking one thing with disliking another. I very much enjoy the type of R.L. Stein "choose-your-own-death" novels-type approach games like PoE or, to use another of your examples, Fallout, utilize.
you see man, i been here posting about RPGs and arguing with people about which RPG is more RPG than what RPG and the Codex has literally shaped my tastes and my manhood (heh. I went through every single phase the RPG codex has gone through:
- the lament of no RPGs being in development, and endless, ENDLESS reminiscing about Fallout/Arcanum/BG (circa 2003 or so)
- the sudden slow trickle of Morrowind players who found this place by accident and thus, old codex lurkers were exposed to that ilk (i.e. as different as can be from the games I mentioned above which were literlaly the only ones talked about because, frankly, no others were better)
So naturally I read all of the arguments by people like vault dweller and sea and Twinfalls and I started playing everything the codex enjoyed and i had now begin my cee-and-cee phase. that phase lasted quite a while!
you know, i even used to think (during that phase) that those old RPGs that didn't feature all of this amazing stuff like one NPC script being triggered depending on which global values the player "played" through. My god! amazing stuff. But what I didn't realize back then is that the ones I really liked, stuff like ToEE and FO1/2... those games had excellent gameplay mechanics, and those games' CHOICE A/B/C fluff was only there for LARPing.
then I spent like 5 years not playing any RPGs cos I had grown sick of these so-called CandC RPGs. Once you've seen one branching story path, my man, you've seem 'em all.
I discovered now these lil ole games and guess what? their gameplay mechanics are the best out of any RPGs I've ever played as they don't try to do all, hell, i'll admit it myself: they don't try to do much really besides... providing the literal best examples in the RPG over-genre of party building, character advancement, encounter design, itemization and the design of the progressive power curve, the very best spell systems, the most difficult battles, the most satisfying simply put: the best all-around fighting, looting, making an varied party with each member completely unique from the other and each one featuring better character advacement than most new RPGs put together in their entirety.
long story short: I realized I like gameplay now more than a mediocre story with something that does not exist, i.e. the Codex's cee-and-cee. Right now, since you're in this phase yourself, this c-and-c is like some sort of magical game design element that is scorchingly hot and new and unbelievably hard to pull off and any RPG that features even a little bit of it, i.e. gives you a fake choice a, a fake choice b, and a fake choice c, (they're all fake because there is no emergent gameplay to be had in a plot-focused, narrative-driven game like all of the ones that the Codex espouses as "real ones"); but soon enough you will realize that it is...
...something that's been in adventure games since the late 70's. in fact, i have in the past (and would do so again) argued succesfully about how introducing c-and-c does not automatically make a game an RPG, and in point of fact (!), the c-and-c that you seek is not even something that makes an RPG feature good gameplay!
so to finish this up: you feel free to enjoy whatever you want, my man, and so will I. Just remember the age old words of wisdom from myself:
it's always the gameplay that people remember, in the end, everything else is flavor text.
PS. I mean, Wasteland 2 had a lot of c-and-c, and so does TToN. I guess that means they're really really good right?
r00fles!