Wrong. Storytelling and role-playing must be equal. At least that is what Bioware's particular market demands.
Role-play in the midst of a weak story is an MMO. We don't want that.
I kindly suggest those who disagree to gtfo of trying to fundamentally alter Bioware games and play Black Desert or Destiny, which are great. I love them myself, too. They will welcome you with open arms.
As you continue to try to alter what they're doing, along with trying to determine what their market demands. I'm going to assume you've got some actual numbers to back that up, but opted not to share them here, so you could unveil them with some dramatic flair later? Of course, as we can tell from this very thread, your hypothesis falls flat, as some of us felt like we got story with room to role play. If I wanted a "tight, linear game", I'd play Assassin's Creed, or TW. I'm sure CDPR would welcome you with open arms.
You want a BioWare game without a story? 
I'm not saying there shouldn't be sidequests, even the kind with no dialogue options or choices involved (I know you guys love your headcanon). Or do you mean they should start making sandbox games or something like The Sims? I definitely wouldn't play either of those. Having a sandbox style game where you have to headcanon everything may be ideal for you but it would be awful for me. In my opinion a tighter and more fleshed out linear story would give more options to roleplay and would allow your actions to have a greater effect on the rest of the story.
Anyway as much as I would love it if BioWare would make games that I love again, my expectations are quite low at this point. If they make the kind of game you describe I'd just not buy it and move on with my life. At that point I'd know there's no point in looking into BioWare's future games and hoping for something more.
I think the point was more "Just say no to a linear story", hence that last line in his post.
Then why are you guys playing Bioware games to begin with? They have always been about story over exploration. DAI is the first game of theirs that is not. Were you playing all previous games reluctantly, hoping that some day a game focused on exploration would emerge? Why not just play a Bethesda game or another exploration game instead? People in this thread have been playing Bioware games because they're story and character focused.
I get that open world exploration is the direction Bioware is moving in, but it's not like this was something we all knew about when we first picked up DAO or DA2 and enjoyed it and wanted more in the same style. People keep saying that we as consumers should have known that DAI would be more open world and shouldn't ask that the change in gameplay we don't like be changed. But that amounts to "so what if you liked the old games? this is the new direction and since I like the new direction better, stop complaining." And if we knew that the game was going to be more open world, should we just not have bought the game? Or bought the game but then pretended we liked everything because we knew it was going to have more exploration? I don't dislike exploration and it can be done well in a way that compliments the story, so I have no way of knowing if a game does that until I play it.
Because I got what I was looking for, in every single game I've played from BioWare? I've been getting it since Baldur's Gate. Insisting that I don't need a cutscene for every single quest in the game isn't the same thing as saying I don't want story, and frankly, Sylvius may just be saying no to "Assassin's Creed in Thedas". That is what a tight, linear story looks like. It doesn't matter if you don't chase the feathers in AC 2, Brotherhood assumes you did. There's your tight, linear story.
I'm not an expert in game production so this is all just my personal opinion, but from what Gaider is saying, the staffing issue is more relevant once the game design has already started and HR has hired/reallocated staff members to their specialized roles. Since DA4 hasn't even been officially announced and Patrick Weekes is the only person working on it, Bioware can very easily decide how many people they need to work on level design, how many on cinematics, how many on writing. It's not like the scope of every game is identical and they just move staff from one game to the next. There are multiple games in production at one time and they're not all the same size or scope, so I don't think it's a 1:1 ratio of "we had 10 level designers in DAI so we have to use 10 level designers in DA4"
Did you play NWN 2? If yes, did you mess with the toolset at all? Unlike NWN, here level design was tiles that you laid out in a grid, in NWN 2, you had to paint every texture, you had to form every hill. I did a couple of areas in NWN 2. It took me 2 weeks to get the terrain right in one of them, including walk meshes, but no towns, no NPCs, no creatures. A level starts out as an X x Y grid. I'm not sure about Frostbite, I've never worked in it, but looking at the terrain variations from map to map, I'd say it's about the same. So trying to say "We only need 4 level designers" which, while maybe that's all they do need, again, I've never worked in Frostbite, I don't know, but in NWN 2, that would mean that you're going to need a long development cycle just to get the areas done, and frankly, some publishers may not want to pay for that, especially if the rest of the game is "done", and they're just waiting on maps to put stuff in. Because all those writers are going to have to be kept on staff until it goes Gold.
They may need to rewrite a scene because it won't work with the terrain/tiles it's supposed to take place in. Animators can't make the cutscenes until they know where they're making them. You can't just make a blank stage and tell the level designers to input the terrain later, like the classic "green screen" from movies. It doesn't work that way. They have to set the stage, which requires that the level be done first. These are things that they know, that you didn't know. These are some of the reasons they staff a game the way they do. It's not "direction", or "we're going to make an ARPG", it's "we need to have these resources available so that we can do x".
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I agree that DA4 should definitely have better use of resources since they should know the engine and have so many assets from DA:I they can reuse.
