I'm a pretty big defender of the average around here but liking Dragon Age 2 is beyond the pale.
I have to agree, DA2 was a horrible cashgrab at best, and incredibly extortionist in both its contents and its marketing. The use of constant repeat terrain, and the plot having basically no connection to an overarching storyline of the series, strikes me as an attempt to capture the audience that aSoF&I was building at the time. There are rampant disconnects between narrative(What is shown) and plot(What is implied) that are immediately obvious at the very start of the game. You fight dark spawn, you kill dark spawn, you flee the blight, you arrive in big ass city, and then it's years later, you are forced to basically accept that you have all these connections, these friends and these enemies, all while not really knowing what's going on.
This disconnect between plot and narrative is even more apparent when you consider that you can play as a mage, in this, the templar city. A city based around the oppression of magic. And you can just firebolt any old bum, and have basically no consequences, even from the get-go when you have virtually no reason to be allowed to do this. No connections that would warrant the not getting immediately rofl pwned by every templar in the city. I stopped playing about the time I used magic to murder my way through an entire templar regiment, and then had the leader of that regiment not realize I used magic to kill all of his/her men.
This was honestly done better in Morrowind. The story there had similar themes, a character forced into an area where they are a foreigner, where the locals are resisting the pull of foreign cultures. But even then in Morrowind, there were consequences inherent to nearly each major action your character takes. Certain quests become impossible, certain areas become locked for times. There's a narrative undertone that is consistent with what the plot overtly shows. And it leads to a much more consistent experience.
You could draw parallels with the more modern thief releases. Where the gameplay was technically, at least competant, but the story built up around it, the tension, the whole of the games stories, were ultimately compromised by the slipshod plots.
So yes, while to your perceptions of the game stated it wasn't flawed, there was an objective lack of effort, and speaking from both a closed system of just dark souls 2 and a comparison to some of it's peers. It was objectively flawed, and those flaws are immediately apparent if you have a single bone in your body that seeks to question what each character is doing at anyone time.