Wow, no wonder Blaine doesn't like it. This game's combat and character systems are a masterwork of gamist/Sawyerist design.
While Banner Saga is totally gamist, I don't know if I would call it particularly Sawyerist. If anything, Banner Saga is way more gamist than anything Sawyer has put out, since Banner Saga really is designed like a board game. What really sets it apart is that battle mechanics and character building in Banner Saga are highly discrete, whereas Sawyer, even in his PnP RPG designs, seems to favour fine-grained derived statistics with very moderate impact on character power. This is something that I have an issue with as far as Sawyer goes - it's as if his design approach were to make statistics fairly complex, yet "balance" them to prevent players from making bad parties, since that "isn't fun". There is something futile about this, though, because really, what's the point of having an elaborate system if it doesn't matter what choices you make in it? That's not gamist at all. In Banner Saga you can build a bad team, but it's not a problem because the system is immediately legible - the difference between 1 Armor Break and 3 Armor Break is enormous and it's clear what the impact on the battlefield will be, so people will naturally start to make informed decisions.
Sawyer's fundamental problem, as far as I can tell, is that he thinks that people generally play games badly. It's a very pessimistic line of thought that I think also strikes many people as conceited. My observation from playing board games, though, is that people are natural strategic thinkers, so long as they're given enough information to act strategically. That is precisely what Banner Saga does - it's a game with simplistic, deterministic (yet precisely calibrated) rules that harshly punish mistakes, which incentivises players to regularly read half-a-dozen moves ahead. This is what makes the game fun and engrossing even when it's not particularly difficult. On the other hand, take something like Neverwinter Nights 2 - I remember playing Mask of the Betrayer and how a few hours in I realised that I had no idea what was even going on during the battles and, more to the point, didn't really even care enough to figure out.
'Course, there are also drawbacks to how abstract and simplified Banner Saga is. For instance, the game lacks varied mission objectives, maps and combat scenarios, and the reason for that is that the mechanics as they are can't really accomodate them. When it slightly tries - for instance, by changing unit placements - it doesn't really work, because there's no advantage for the enemy in, say, having the player's party surrounded; in fact, this situation is strictly advantageous for the player since it means that you can just wipe out one half of the map while the enemy is busy moving useless units on the other side. This is probably the biggest problem Banner Saga has compared to crunchier games which can handle different scenarios with more ease. One thing I hope the future games will do is introduce some special rules and victory conditions for different battle situations like sieges, raids and so on - the Bellower battle was a lot of fun specifically because the fight broke a lot of the implicit rules of the game, which made things a lot more dramatic than they otherwise would've been.