I really wish the people in the patch topic would take a page out of your book Verrenus. Instead of being all internet rage and pitchforks, you're just taking it one step at a time. Like others in here, I appreciate you're willingness to help everyone out.
I actually feel like I can relax a little bit in this thread. I feel encouraged to enjoy the game by other posters in here and a few other threads. It's a nice change over having folks try to tell me I'm an idiot/sheeple/drone because I'm having fun. Threads like this just add to my enjoyment of the game in the long term. I also love seeing enthusiastic and helpful fans. I know when things mellow a bit around here, a lot of the random spewing hatred is going to calm down some. In the meantime, I look for fun and helpful threads with fans that are enjoying the game.
Very nice comprehensive post. Thumbs Up.
Thank you very much for the kind thoughts, guys, your support of my work is humbling and incredibly appreciated! 
I, for one, believe that no problem is without a solution and this thread aims to apply that to DA:I as well. Together, I just know we can make this a better game experience for everyone willing to tinker around a bit! 
Do you have Windows 8.1 I could have sworn you said you didn't before maybe? I only mention it because Win 8.1 has some issues with SweetFX running properly as opposed to Win 7 where it just works. But ya as soon I stop spending 20 hours (literally) into character creator I am totally gonna give cookie's preset a try!
Well Sweetfx was working before the latest patch, now the game crashes on launch. I have tried kputts and used the x64 dll's too 
I have windows 8 x64 and a nvidia card, I tried radeon pro and that produces same result, has anyone else had problems?
That's correct, I'm still on Windows 7 myself, so I personally don't have any issues with SweetFX at the moment. That being said, when I will upgrade to Windows 8.1 soon, I will probably have to find another means of making it work as well. Of course, I will then report back with any fixes and also update the OP! 
Mi1amber, did you try contacting Crabby for more information on running SweetFX on Windows 8, or even K-putt through the SweetFX database comments system? I'm sure you can get some good advice from either one of them! 
I tried it earlier, and it's working. You have to set it on multiplier.
For example:
render.resolutionscale 2.0
2.0 will make the resolution 2x of the original. If you set the multiplier with 2 without the .0 it'll lag like hell or crash. You can also set the multiplier at 1.5 or any number.
To revert it back, set it to 1.0.
This is great news for people with beefier hardware! I will update the OP with a section on downsampling via the in-game console, thanks a lot for sharing this! 
Thanks for this info. This basically fixed the freezing problem I started having after a couple days of otherwise problem-free playing. The game started stalling after playing for one to two hours, with greater frequency and for longer periods, no matter what I did with lowered settings or turning off things like my virus scanner or aero (doing the latter delayed things a bit, but eventually it would still start freezing up on me). I gave this a try, checked off all the completed quests in my journal (must have been a couple hundred, these add up fast), ongoing collections and quests and all codex entries. Then the game spent a couple minutes telling me tons of old quests had been completed and I was able to play the game for over five hours without issue. Each time I now complete a quest, I'll go into my journal, highlight the completed quest, leave the journal, and get another quest completed pop-up. This definitely isn't working right.
While on the one hand I'm glad this problem can be circumvented, on the other this is pretty shonky programming that all this info is being kept in memory and just accumulates until your ram and cpu-threads are filled to bursting, bringing your entire system to a screeching halt. I've seen this type of behavior before in Bethesda games or the first Witcher game with more and more info and active scripts being kept in memory to eventually destabilize the game; you'd think they'd have paid attention to this kind of thing by looking at where earlier open-world games had issues.
Indeed, this is most definitely a bug and should be pointed out to BioWare so that they can patch it as soon as possible! People should never have to deal with this sort of problem in an RPG with hundreds of journal entries! 
So I just did a bunch of stuff to try to fix the cutscene stuttering but to no avail. I tried running cc cleaner, followed by removing all of Origin's registry data and then clean booting my pc. Then I did what Natashina did by removing my video drivers, using Guru3d in safe mode, and doing a clean reinstall. Seems like nothing is working. I even changed the FPS limit to integers instead of whole numbers, setting it to 59.99, as I am running at 144hz. Still nothing. At this point I think I'm going to admit defeat and wait until another patch to see if they fix it. It's a shame really, but at least I have a ton of other games to keep me busy until then!
I also want to try out that SweetFx once I actually start playing. Looking at the pictures I think I prefer KPutt's over Cookie's. The colors look a bit warmer and more vibrant from what I can tell. It also seems like it's a less drastic visual change, and I think I'd prefer it to look closer to the original.
Did you try setting your mouse slider a few notches to the right of the default setting? This has been known to fix cutscene stuttering, for some obscure reason! 