I could never shake the feeling that I would have preferred playing a remake of Neverwinter Nights 2 (which has a nearly identical system) in the engine. NWN2 is just as generic and has plenty of flaws in its own design, but it had a brisk pace that kept things moving.

Honestly, if they dialed down the sheer number of often-quite-challenging combat encounters in favor of fewer, more interesting ones I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more. I might check this one out when it’s patched up and on sale and see if it is the step up you present it as being.

When I read what people who like those games say it looks to me like they enjoy skipping gameplay. All those broken builds and secret items use doesn’t give you cool abilities, it gives you high stats allowing you to beat everyone with autoattack (as long as you spend several minutes pre-buffing every now and then). I know it sounds like an ignorant “you aren’t actually having fun, you sheeple allowed the game to trick you into having fun” but I saw how good games like Pillars of Eternity 2 give you all the complexity without noob traps and obscure rules and hostility to the player. PoE2 doesn’t felt like a huge achievement to me till I played BG1, Planescape Torment and PFKM, saw how those games usually play and realized how much I took for granted.

Everything I read about WotC is cool but I know it’s the same mess. I’ve played Kingmaker with TB mode already implemented and it helped to understand how the stuff works in the beginning, but later it seemed like there isn’t much you can do in a specific situation except doing obvious stuff (concentrate attacks, heal the wounded), maybe apply short-term buff in an especially difficult fight or reload and use some consumable buffs. People hate kingdom management but for me it was the most interesting part of the game. There were interesting thematic choices to make and it felt like there’s a weight behind decisions made in dialog. Character progression had this feel too, but in d20 you decide on your build when you create a character and then just follow it, you’re not supposed to have interesting choices on levelup.

Maybe one day I get WotC Ultimate Enhanced Director’s Cut and play it on a higher difficulty so that it doesn’t feel like an idle game the way Pathfinder did.. You make it sound like not the worst idea.