Which would've been more of a fair tradeoff if she was fully developed as a companion, but alas... she is not. Same as with the other non-origin characters.
Eh. In terms of polish, yes. In terms of content, she has more than most DAO characters.
If we compare BG3 to DAO instead, I think that Origins provides a superior illusion of narrative freedom due to how the dialogue is written.
At the very start, maybe. After that, it's almost 100% fake Bioware choices. The only thing they do sort of better is giving the player the "freedom" of the order they explore areas. Gather the 4 mcguffins etc., like in KOTOR.
Really not much different from picking which path to Moonrise, albeit Moonrise was a choke point in the middle instead of the endgame.
BG3 meanwhile gives you more concrete narrative choices to be evil only for it to result in less narrative content for your playthrough hence playing evil makes for a less defined PC
I disagree, since the evil acts you can commit are far more meaningful than the flavor evils of other games. Are you a Durge that gives into madness? Are you a custom PC who is evil in other ways? Are you a brain-eating mind flayer? Are you a manipulator who played the druids against the teiflings, or were you a chaotic evil psychopath who butchered the teiflings for the fun of it?
The simplified ending is the greatest sin, I agree, but before that, there are any number of choices you can make to define your character.
DAO had concepts that were dropped or streamlined in the following games like prologue vignettes, which I did feel were incline, but that didn't really matter much by the endgame in most cases. The exception being the human noble, who gets a little extra content. And in the end, you still defeat the Archfiend, and the only choice is whether you bang Claudia Black first or not.
-> doing evil stuff whose consequences the narrative has to nullify in order for you to continue on the narrative path which was designed with a good PC in mind
Here's how my Durge path went:
Act I
met the frog
saved Shadowcunt
recruited the gay elf (tautology)
saved Gale instead of killing him
met the teiflings
recruited Wyll
recruited Karlach
got the druids to kill the teiflings so no one blamed me for it
kept and used the Necronomicon
recruited Halsin (though I think this was more of a bug because he shows no reaction to the druids dying)
sided with Minthara,
who invaded without me because the teifs were already dead
knocked out Wyll and Karlach before the goblin party so they wouldn't know what happened (I will admit it is weak that I have to do this, but it's bugged, since I didn't kill the teifs anyway and he and Karlach will still blame me)
did the underdark etc and then doubled back to do the creche
made it to act 2 without killing a companion
Act II
killed the drider
went to the harper village
betrayed the other chosen in order to gain Jaheira's trust
gave into my durge instincts and killed the Mary Sue dyke upstairs for fun
lied to Jaheira about doing it
recruited Jaheira
got the Slayer form as a payment for killing the Mary Sue dyke
And I'll skip ahead to the endgame where Jaheira finally asks me how I got that Slayer form and I told her "by killing every harper in Last Light". Or the very end, where because I didn't save the teiflings, Karlach's smith dies and she burns away to ashes on the dock.
I won't even complete the list here, but I think you can already see parts that differ from your game. You can still get Jaheria, Minsc etc. You can still recruit the vast majority of NPCs if you're creative, or just kill them for the fun of it. You can just leave the teiflings to die and shrug. You can save them and still be an evil bastard in Last Light, or you can play the long game and not give in to evil until the end. That's a lot of ways to define a character and playstyle to me.
Not getting as much content as a good character because you specifically choose to murder all the NPCs isn't a negative. It should be expected. Otherwise there is no real consequence, and you just get the good flavor replaced with the evil flavor.