I agree 100%. I loved the DLC, but it felt like there was a scene missing between Solas pacifying the anchor and the Inquisitor walking in to the chamber with no lower arm. This is made particularly stark to me by the fact that everyone else in the room doesn't even blink at the lack of an arm. no one mentions it, looks at it shocked, gasps about it, etc. So clearly, off screen, the Inquisitor got back to the palace, had their arm removed/flake off, and everyone but the player had time to adjust to it.
The shock value achieved in the scene we see is negated for me by the disconnect of no one else being shocked in the least. I could have gotten the same shock (ie: Her arm is GONE?! O.O) in a reveal in an emotional moment where the Inquisitor is waking from convalescing after it happened and I dunno, the love interest or Josie or someone comes to the room to tell her/him the tribunal is resuming, as well as asking how s/he's feeling and if they're even up to making an appearance.
Ah, but you see, the shock portion of the shock value here is not aimed at everybody else (i.e. the characters) - it is aimed at you. But yeah, your entire reply was almost a point-by-point description of my thought process playing through Trespasser the first time around 
Nobody reacts to the arm being gone - not the Inquisitor, not the members of their posse, not the council at large. There are some gasps, yes, but those do not come until the Inquisitor starts talking about the future of the Inquisition.
Just the quiet reveal of the arm missing to let us take in the emotional impact of it, along with seeing our Inquisitor react to it via body language and maybe a short convo. (Though, really, it could just be a full on cutscene with no dialogue choices and still work.)
Agreed. It does not need to be big or made needlessly more complicated by having somebody else present. People have suggested a LI, but - what if that particular Inquisitor does not have a LI? Will they not be allowed to process an incredibly traumatic experience just because of that? And it can be done so easily - as you pointed out, it need not even have dialogue (like the How to Train Your Dragon clip, which features very little and, in the moment when Hiccup realizes what has happened, has no dialogue at all) . The arm crumbles, Inquisitor collapses, your party shouting as it fades to black. Then, with the screen still black, sound starts coming back first. People are arguing somewhere - their voices are muffled, though, as if they were separated from you by a closed door. Picture comes next - blurry ceiling. The Inquisitor sits up as things come back into focus. They are in bed back in the Winter Palace and everything hurts like hell. The Inquisitor winces. But something is wrong. There is an odd sense of weightlessness on one side, felt all the way up to the shoulder joint, as if some of the pull it is used to feeling is no longer there. Perhaps too afraid to look, they reach with the other hand to feel what is wrong, but only grasp at air. As the camera pans out, the missing limb is revealed swathed in bandages. The Inquisitor takes a few deep breaths trying to keep calm, trying not to give in to the rising panic. That is when the arguments get louder. They are shouting over each other about what happened with the Qunari, with Solas, how will it affect the rest of the Exalted Council and the Inquisition. The Inquisitors shock is replaced with determination. There is still work to do. They get out of bed.
It would take a minute at most. Also, there already was a similar scene in the game - the trek through the Frostbacks after Haven, followed by the Dawn Will Come and culminating in the coronation of the Inquisitor. Similar beats would be recreated, and by echoing Haven, you would multiply the emotional impact by tapping into the impressions left by that scene, and create the anticipation that something bigger is still afoot - Same but Different.
Even this guy knows what I am saying and he is never wrong 
In all seriousness, though, people often make fun of this remark (and often not without reason), but there is merit to it - only the storytelling mechanic discussed here has to be applied with care, not dropped like a fifteen megaton bomb.
Then you go to the courtroom and have your awesome speech.
If the Inquisitor comes back in DA4, I do hope they make up for this by showing her/him dealing with their prosthetic. It doesn't have to be a big thing. Just maybe rubbing at their stump as they are attaching/detaching the limb for the day, maybe before someone comes into the room they're in to see them or something. Just a quiet moment or two to show this has taken a toll on them.
Think of the couple of quiet moments they slipped in for Shepard throughout ME3, where there'd be no dialogue really, for that few second at the beginning or end of a larger cutscene. Just the camera would be on Shepard looking at a pile of data pads, or staring off into space after closing the comms with Admiral Hackett. Quiet bits that show the stress. Body language and acting, basically. Like how movies do it. DA2 and DAI itself also did this with its cutscenes a lot, though in DAI it was typically with the NPCs not the PC. The point is, though, there's precedent.
I actually replayed Trespasser relatively recently, and in comparison with the base game, it was so much more right in so many more ways than the base, especially with the Inquisitor. For instance, that scene where the gang is drinking with Dorian because he is about to leave, but the Inquisitor does not know, and Varric lets it accidentally slip - the Inquisitor says nothing to Varric or to Dorian - they just give them both a look. It is little more than a nice little touch, but that one look alone tells you everything you need to know and it is such a perfect character moment. Which is also a bit bad - you see that they can do impactful scenes without the necessity for much dialogue - so why not this?
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