Pacing and length of the main campaign is most definitely an issue. However, this is Bioware's first foray into open-world, so hopefully they will iron out the kinks if this is the future of the series.
Come to think of it, Hinterlands may have been a big problem that Bioware hadn't been able to detect without hindsight. It is the very first "open-world" area, and where the main quest lies. It is also one of the largest areas with a truly stupendous amount of side-quests, fetch quests, and general busy-work. However, since the area is directly linked to the story, and is the first we come across, many players (including myself) spend a LOT of time exploring it. Personally, come Skyhold, I was already feeling very burnt out by the open-world explorations, and yet a whole slew of new areas are simply thrown into my face, and with minimal context to the main story as well. At this point, I believe many players would shift their focus to the story, only to realise it ends after 3 or 4 missions.
This, along with direction, was precisely my problem. They just throw you into the Hinterlands to start off with, which, like you said, I'm pretty sure is the largest zone in the game. I got lost pretty quickly and ended up spending about five hours doing side quests on the wrong side of the map before I discovered where the story quest was. And like you said, by the time I actually got to Skyhold, I was so tired of missions that I just focused on the story instead.
That being said, I still love the game (it got me to return to the Bioware forums after two and a half years at that), but I think another key point they missed was clear direction. Yeah, you could tell which quest was the main one if you checked the journal, but I felt more "You should do this between these quests" or "This is a level 12 quest" (those Rifts in the Hinterlands were the bane of my level 4 existence), or maybe even sidequests that expired after a certain point ala ME3 to give more urgency or reason to do them at a certain point, some way to flow into the main plot better. I don't know, but it took me a good 20 hours to finally get the hang of mixing story with sidequests, and even that didn't work out well - I put 20 hours into trying to do every sidequest I could do between the Fade and the next quest, and even then I felt overwhelmed and tired of them. Great game, pacing, length, and direction could use work, but otherwise loved it.
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