Roleplaying games, more than other genres, offer choice. That's their schtick. Make your own character, choose your own path, tell your own story. Broadly speaking there are three kinds of choice: 1) Set-up 2) Action and 3) Narrative. Gamers who love their roleplaying games want it more than anything. Choice is King.
Despite the bugs, and poor UI, I think the biggest problem for DA:I is the lack of meaningful choice. In my opinion, Bioware ran into this with ME3 too - made all the more meaningless as it served as the capstone for the entire trilogy. Choice is incredibly important in this genre. One either needs to label Bioware's games as action adventures with very light roleplaying... or they need to understand how to better deliver meaningful choice to it's players.
1. Set-up or character creation
Set-up choices cover things like your character's sex, species, hairstyle, eye colour, class, etc. These things don't usually change through a play through, and if done well, your choices here should garner you specific content to reflect the choices you've made. If you choose an elf in Thedas, that decision comes with a bunch of consequences, which if done well, are delivered through the game.
The reason why the character creator is so important in a roleplaying game, is that it's a relatively "cheap" way to give players a huge amount of choice. My female elven character most likely won't look anything like your female elven character, for example - and we as players put great value in this. Which is why, when something doesn't all look all that great (hairstyles), people complain a lot.
I think DAI has good set-up choices. Other than unattractive hair, the character creator is a wonderfully deep tool to making a character uniquely your own. And for the most part (although this could be a lot more - an Elf Mage running the Inquisition and every human is fine with that?), your choices in race and sex, are reflected back at you through the game. I'm not sure that there are bespoke missions (well not that I noticed with my elf) for each race (other than that Dalish Camp war table thing... which isn't what I'd consider deep and meaningful), but enough in general that it's not as if your choices here during the set-up just don't matter at all. One of the consequences on your sex, is whom is available to be romanced. This is cool.
2. Action or Verbs
Action choices are things like skills, ability points, equipment, attacks, ... choices that are how you directly interact with the world. Pickpocketing, sneaking, teleporting, back stabbing, striking with your sword, casting a fireball, deceiving, flirting, bartering... are all ways roleplaying games allow you to interact with the world in an active manner. It's also a little in how you look, your choice in armour or whether to wear a helmet or not.
Key here is progression, which is usually represented with ability or skill points, or a skill tree. You usually start out quite poor at a particular task, but by the end of the game, if you've trained it, poured points in it, or just learned how to use it better... you're now awesome in that "verb". Allowing the gamer multiple ways to interact with challenges in the world really helps to provide them with even greater choice, and defines their character that they are creating by their actions. Initially my elf mage eschewed the inferno tree, only for roleplaying reasons. It was a choice that helped my define the character I was busy defining as I was playing.
Another aspect of progression is how you look; you want to look more and more the part as you play through the game. By the end of it, you want your wish fulfilment - fulfilled. If you've been wading into the battle with bastard sword, no care in the world... you kinda want huge metal armour, horned helmets, spiky kneepads. If you've been sneaking and lurking and being shadowy... then cloth wrapped boots, fingerless gloves, dark hoods, black leather, small blackened blades - all this helps to visually define your character. The more choice here, the more the character can be owned by the player.
First, you make your own character, then you are choosing how to solve the challenges in the game with the tools the game has provided; and then you're choosing what to look like while doing it.
Unfortunately, the tool set (the verbs) in DAI are about doing damage or controlling an enemy in combat. There are no abilities or skills that can be chosen that aren't about being used in combat. Notable exception is the lock pick skill, which is either free from the start if you pick rogue, or a perk you purchase for your group's rogues. But there isn't anything else that is activated out in the field. The choices you have for combat are many; multiple trees in each of the three classes, but many of these choices are essentially the same choice, just with a different name or flourish. And nearly all of them result in some splashy firework in combat. This is not so much of a problem when the game is an action game like Darksiders, but it is a problem when the game says it's a roleplaying game.
Having three classes, and their specialisations, it is clear the developers want us to care about our choices in combat. That for them the enjoyment of the game, the very essence of the game, is what occurs in a combat. As long as combats can be different and remain interesting due to their enemy composition, or the environment or the consequences - this isn't a bad approach. It's when those battles become repetitive, or one's strategy to solve them is the same, or the terrain doesn't feature, that the fun of combat (and by extension the fun of one's action choices) begins to pale. The problem here is that DA:I isn't the best combat game; it doesn't have counters (batman/ass-creed), it doesn't mêlée lock on (dark souls), you cannot dodge (guild wars), you cannot move and cast if you're a mage, it's very hard to flank enemies as they're very mobile, enemies don't seem to have much difference in the behaviours. They swarm. In tactics mode, you cannot queue actions, actions can be interrupted and forgotten by your group, ranged attackers don't take higher ground, you cannot tell any individual to hold, holding is rubber banded to your position, camera doesn't allow you to see the field of battle, enemies are just jugs of hit points. So, if combat was supposed to be the be all and end all of the experience, why is there such a litany of poor design choices here.
That said... if you ignore tactics, the battles with the dragons are the best content in the game. The environment you find the dragon in, the dragon itself, the phased nature of the combat, all is tremendously rewarding. You can and have to use the environment to not be burned alive. You have to pause to tell an NPC "drink this!", "Go there!". It's good visceral fun action. The skeletons rising out of the water in the swamps is also another great use of the environment to change up how we approach our choices in combat. In fact, when I got there and read that the undead were vulnerable to fire, I respec'd my mage to be more effective. That's great.
In comparison, the battles with respawning bears and wolves are not great. In fact any random respawn enemy - yawn. They are not meaningful in the same ways as the above combats. I'd even say that the final battle against Corypheus is very uninspired, and offers nothing new which is a shame as he's supposed to be the Big Bad Evil Dude of The Forever.
Another lack of choice here, is how you look. Crafting is usually a tedious chore requiring components to be collected, and schematics to be found; that if the player perseveres is rewarded with a choice of something cool to wear (that also does more of X). Being in Skyhold robs you of your hard work here, as you're forced to wear something that doesn't change throughout the game, that looks the same for every race and sex, and was never your choice. One can nitpick about the number of different looking armours in the game, that the progression here isn't gradual but occurs in 3-4 distinct steps, but that's neither here nor there. The point is there is progression in how you look, while you're out in the world.
3. Narrative or go to page 67.
The last type of choice is that of narrative. It can occur as a consequence of a dialogue option, or by deciding to go left instead of going right (when you cannot take ever take the other choice again). This kind of choice is perhaps the hardest to pull off, because it's either illusion (there is no choice, but the player doesn't know), or results in the player not getting to see content (content which cost money to make). That said, I think this kind of choice is the most important in a roleplaying game. Many love these hard irrevocable choices, which is exactly why Telltale games do so well. It's Choose Your Own Adventure playing out large and in colour on your TV or monitor.
These choices are what save files are for. It's why DAI has a dedicated site to create the prior two games choices so that your world state at the start of DAI is your own. Most of these choices are delivered in just a bit of dialogue, but regardless they still matter.
This is where, I think, DAI has really lost its rpg credentials, as I'm not convinced in my 90 hour playthrough, that the vast majority of my choices actually mattered to the story.
There is so much dialogue in Bioware's games that it's understandable that not every single line your character chooses can irrevocably branch off an entirely new storyline, but at the same time, when you can see that any of the three available choices in a dialogue option all lead to the same place, or that the response from the speaker answers all three of those choices, that's when you know that this tiny little choice doesn't matter. And when a whole bunch of tiny little choices don't matter, one questions if the big ones matter.
Mages vs templars? Does it matter? If so, how? Doing all the inner circle quests. Does it matter? if so, how? Maybe they do, and maybe I'd have to play through multiple times to appreciate the subtle differences, because I certainly didn't feel like they mattered in my story. And when you are in that space as a gamer... that, it doesn't matter space.... all the codexes, and long dialogue chains, cannot make it whole again. Did I maybe "choose" all the boring bits?
Having a huge open world to go adventure in is another problem that doesn't contribute directly to making a choice in the story. It does add power, and it may give you levels, but narratively... having secured this area over that area. Having solved this skull-light puzzle or closed that breach, it ultimately doesn't serve the greater story and even worse on occasion doesn't really serve the area locally either. Exploring is fun just on its own, but it should always somehow matter.
When the watch towers went up in the Hinterlands, I was happy... as my hard work meant the villagers and farmers came back to their farms, and my choice to intervene had left a mark on the land. This happens too rarely.
The approves and disapproves mechanic is supposedly a metric of consequence. The funny thing about it though, is that it can fire multiple times on either side through a single dialogue. It also invariably doesn't align with the disapproving/approving dialogue of the NPC. Solas went from greatly disapproves, to verbally supporting my argument, to slightly approving after he spoke - all through one dialogue chain. And then when I spoke to him next afterwards back at skyhold, he was very happy with my decision. Why was he so disapproving at the start then? Is he a big flake? No, everyone does it too. When no NPCs leave, or have stern words with you (which admittedly may be due to me not giving them enough reason to), it begins to feel like choice, as far as dialogue goes, doesn't change anything.
Why isn't there consequence for example in your choice of team. When Cole arrives, Cassandra disapproves, but never leaves. One never has to make a choice of Cole or Cassandra. That's a great choice to have to make.
Witcher 2's entire second act is a single choice. You either play one path or the other. That's cool.
Final thoughts
It's got to do with expectation. If you have none, or if you expect an action game with very light roleplaying (i.e. mechanics geared to choice), then I think you'd be more than happy with DA:I. DA;I is a very beautiful and big game, one I am ultimately satisfied with, and one I'm glad I played, but it is also a Bioware game, and as a result of that pedigree, I expected my choices to have mattered more than they did, and that's a bit of shame.
edit: DA:I won best roleplaying game for 2014, and so its developers, gamers at large, and the gaming press consider it a roleplaying game. I wish all self identified roleplaying games had more meaningful choice.
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I was telling my TV "Yeah Thedas! Mages are gonna Rule!" 
