Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of fun to do stuff in the sand-box, but the whole point of story is sort of lost after Haven. You aren't pressured into getting rid of the big evil menacing the world as we know it, we have time to save a ram, find a ring for a random woman, you can spend weeks exploring places that have no tie to the story or events (like forbidden oasis or hissing wastes), no matter what you do at winter palace, nothing will change in the world etc.
This is all true, but it was also true in Origins. It was also true in Baldur's Gate and pretty much every other CRPG ever. There are loads of side quests (generally repetitive in nature and limited in breadth) that you can do that are completely tangential to the main quest. The core storyline constitutes a small part of the overall play time. We are informed that our enemy is on the move and time is of the essence if we want to thwart his diabolical plans, but nothing ever happens due to our inaction or deciding to take time to solve the problems of everyone we run into, however incidental they are to our quest and however illogical it would be for us to waste precious time doing so. All of these tropes have been well-established for a long time, and are present as much or moreso in the games that we hold up as shining examples of how great things used to be.
Inasmuch as there is a difference between Inquisition and earlier games, I think it boils down to two things. First, Inquisition itself makes the repetitive and tangential nature of its sidequests plainly obvious due to the way it is constructed and presented. (A simple example: in DAO, most of the repetitive optional side quests were hidden on job boards where you didn't see them if you didn't go looking; in DAI they are all marked on your map, making them hard to ignore. Another is the obvious way in which sidequests are needed to generate the power points required to unlock the next story segment, making their role as speed bumps hard to ignore.) Other games have done a better job of concealing the repetitive nature of the gameplay, irrelevance of much of the content, and reactive nature of the world (meaning the world doesn't do anything except in response to you manipulating it). This is a legitimate weakness in Inquisition: the designers could have done better.
Second, as we play more and more of these games, we get better at deconstructing the games: recognizing how they are put together and how they attempt to make us feel as though we are participating in an epic and dynamic story even as we engage in simple, repetitive tasks with fixed outcomes. At the same time, we expect more from current games than we did from their predecessors. So we're left in a position where our expectations keep increasing while at the same time we are increasingly unable to avoid seeing through the illusions that disguise the underlying guts and mechanics. I don't think there's much that the designers could do to avert this, apart from turning out a masterpiece of creative genius, but that sort of thing can't be done on command, no matter the budget or schedule.
That said, I think there have been and continue to be improvements in game design, depth and complexity. Not every game is better than its predecessors, but we've come a long, long way from, say, Ultima IV: a game that totally blew me away for its depth and richness when it was released in 1985. I don't think I'll ever be as immersed in another CRPG as I was when I first played it, but I'd reject out of hand any new game with that kind of gameplay, even if I might replay and even enjoy Ultima IV itself for nostalgic reasons.
I also want to point out that there is nothing wrong with repetitive gameplay that is convincingly disguised so as to present the illusion of something more complex. CRPGs are illusions to begin with; constructing good illusions is the hallmark of a good designer. Unfortunately, being able to see through illusions is one of the involuntary powers of the experienced gamer.
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