While you're not wrong, the slight (but important) difference here is that there are fewer companions and Aloth is the only arcane caster...
I'm guessing the devs didn't want to screw your party composition options with one dialogue line with high consequences
hold the fuck on bro.
josh stated no class is obligatory that was whole idea of balance.
and if you don't want to screw party composition, you can, you know, just use introductory dialogue without anyone attacking companion.
Not to mention that, in the worst case, you can still hire a recruit from the tavern and use them instead of Aloth. You will miss out on his quest and dialogue, but gameplay wise you should have pretty much the same experience.
I think PoE would probably be tolerable if not for the complete absence of the "show, don't tell" philosophy. The arbitrary character stats that don't represent anything concrete in-universe are unforgiveable as well, but at least that's more easily ignored. I've never looked into PoE modding, but I wonder if anybody has made one that cuts out all the irrelevant filler flavor text.
I find the game tolerable - mostly - when looking at it purely from a gameplay perspective. The stats that give you +1 to some other stat (so you have to keep jumping through your character sheet to find out what anything does) is really dumb (which I complained about in another thread), but they at least MOSTLY tried to fix the existing problems with Infinity Engine games, and (in my opinion) mostly succeeded. The camping system is great. So is the health/endurance system. The core gameplay is pretty great.
It's just a shame that all their efforts to improve the gameplay are stuck behind an extremely slow, lackluster and barely readable story, that you really have to trudge through in order to really get started playing.
Sadly this is the industry's standard. A plenty of RPGs offer only cosmetic choices, because creating unique content outside of a "critical path" is too much work when you're making a role-playing game. Frankly, it makes me angry to just think about how stupid this is.
I think Bethesda are the kings of this trend. Fallout 3 (and most other RPGs that let you be an "evil character") only really let you be evil in very specific ways. You can be a supervillain and blow up megaton while twirling your mustache, but short of shooting people in the face you can't really do anything truly evil. Even if you poison the water supply at the end of the game, the broken steel DLC just plain assumes that didn't happen and so the world never changes at all. You can't oppress people or set up manipulative, evil situations to your benefit. Your choices are random murder, random enslavement, or stealing tiny amounts of things from everyone until you tick over into "evil" karma.
I really want more RPGs where I can make choices that will result in genuinely evil outcomes. Especially if those outcomes benefit me in the short term. Even fucking Deus Ex let you take the easy way out by killing people rather than going non-lethal, and certain characters would support or chastise you depending on your actions. THAT'S much closer to real RPG gameplay, and Deus Ex isn't even a real RPG in the strictest sense.
I actually blame George Martin for this. Because readers know all details should be important and Martin wants to subvooooooort expectations, he intentionally fills in every detail whether important or not and leaves the reader to sift through the detritus. I find it odious and unreadable, but the dude sold a shitzillion copies so what do I know.
I blame Tolkien, actually. He is basically infamous for describing the intricate details of the party's bar crawls (complete with multiple pages of singing) before they finally rest for the night and continue again in the next chapter.