I don't question the quality of the game, I just don't feel that just doing Baldur's Gate again, twenty years later, really warrants ALL of the hype. Like the games from that time people still talk about, like Planescape Torment, Arcanum, even something like Fallout 2 or somewhat later Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines are games that are just a bit more "out there". Baldur's Gate feels comparably more vanilla compared to those. It's full of tropes and it does them well, but as far as I've played it doesn't always manage to rise above them and even from a design standpoint it is not that much different from original Baldurs Gate games.

I guess this is more of a lament about the state of the industry right now, but the fact that twenty years of gaming evolution leads to just doing the same types of games again but doesn't really fill me with that much excitement.

Those damn gamers and their expectations of receiving a quality product they pay for!

There is still stuff in here that other games have managed to fix like a decade ago, like being able to access all your characters inventory in the camp, having a place where all the books and texts you've read are collected, automatically picking up gold or merging the inventories of enemies when their bodies are close together. The quest log is just a void filled with text, without any flavor or convenience whatsoever, no way to click on a quest and see where the quest marker is or anything like that. Same with the map, there's no worldmap that shows the location of the individual maps on some larger scale that would help you orient yourself, no way to even switch between the different maps and all the fast travel points are just in one giant list. Also even in singleplayer I've not found an actual way to pause this game. For a game that was in early access for three years, these feel like basic things that never got the second round of polish they deserved.

Would need to lean on AI for something like that, I think. Keep the normal human-acted main cast/supporting characters, delegate everything else to AI.

It's already been done with a Skyrim mod.

Personally, I don't mind reading and I wish we'd get more games that don't require voice acting for everything. It'd allow them to do so much more with a lot less. I do think at some point we'll get that that point with synthesized voices, but it isn't quite there yet. I've used several in Ludum Dare games, and they sound great but not perfect. Still, even as they are if they let devs write more and create more options, I'd take it. Adding options with voice acting balloons work required fast, so that's why it's so often fake choice but the other person responds similarly no matter what you say.