Yes, they started for a single character with a predefined head shape and hair that only needs to not clip through her cheek (and didn't achieve this), not numerous different sets of armour and every single cutscene in the game, and any possible face shape. That's a lot harder.
Would be 100% worth the cost for me though.
progress does take time and experimentation unfortunately. And with videogames it's as much as an art as painting, movies, music, sculpting, and dance when developing new techniques and more. Many times the techniques are tested with one group and show promise and other group tries to reverse engineer, emulate, or replicate it and finding new tricks and some of the tricks you can learn just by watching what is presented others you need to look at the DNA/programming for. From there it just pinballs around to all the studios around and eventually someone finds the needle in the haystack on the preferred execution and everyone starts doing it.
for armor models, how many variants are there in the base game? probably like 15 unique models in the base game per class. That is not too much to individually program.
for the faces if they are able to get a formula in that "along X/Y axis redirect the flow of hair to go along for Z amount of points then let gravity take over" they could implement a function that they get the co-ordinates for the formula directly from the sliders. It shouldn't be too far from your character looking in different directions when you set the eyeballs to be in the cheeks or on top of their forehead. The game knows where the eyes are and how to align the pupils regardless of where they are placed and that can be modified and applied here.
Don't get me wrong not saying your point is not valid. I want this as much as you do because Morrigan's bangs doing that is just immersion breaking and they don't have much excuse for that and I'm glad that coryfish stopped his clipping after a few patches, I forgot what it was exactly, I think that armor shard sticking out of his chin clipping through his chest. And I'm not saying that I know how to do bioware's job or programing is easy; more using you as a springboard for potential methods that bioware might not have thought of, after all it usually is the fresher minds that think of the simplest options as opposed to making things too complexed.