Yeah I mostly agree. Mass Effect Andromeda had the same potential, only the story is worse. Still both games have great open areas and a good foundation, ruined by shit quest design and boring tasks.
I tried Millennial Effect: Andromeda a while back and I disagree about that. The problem with it is that the story/writing/companions are incredibly juvenile and un-relatable.
DA:I isn't great littrachaw mind, but the characters are not one-note. Cassandra has unshakable faith but grapples with dilemmas related to duty, but secretly reads romance novels. Leliana has transformed from a bubbly dreamgirl into a hardened spymaster (still with perfect skin tho, missed product placement opportunity there) who
is grappling with a crisis of faith. Sera acts, looks, and talks like she had foetal alcohol syndrome but while muddled is pretty coherent about how she sees the world and her place in it, the only companion in fact who doesn't seem to have any great existential questions at all, and is pretty perceptive about how things really work. You've got Dorian with his family history and conflicted relationship with his fatherland, Solas who is at the same time a genuine bro and extremely creepy, and so on and so forth. The scene between Varric and Cassandra when Varric finally gets Hawke to turn up is great, here we have characters each with their own agenda they feel very strongly about but show in quite different ways.
This is legit good companion writing, much better than par for the industry. All the Pillars companions and their dilemmas seem one-dimensional by comparison. It's also much better than in the Mass Effects, in fact I think it might be the best BioWare has ever done.
I'm also digging the look and feel of the world. It doesn't completely avoid the theme-park effect but does a pretty good job of it a lot of the time -- the maps are lush, beautiful, and a lot of the time feel lived-in rather than just set up for your benefit.
(There's a lot of derp with the worldbuilding though, some of it facepalm-worthy. Like how they've gone out of their way to make the cast a complete rainbow coalition of all genders, skin colors, sizes, and orientations, and then just replaced that with elves = jews, dwarves = also jews but a different variety, qunari = the invading muslim horde, orlais = france but with even sillier accents and clothes, and so on.)