I might have to check Dragon Age 2 out after I get around to the first one then. I mostly just remember the scathing reviews (game was made in like 12 months or something reusing a lot of assets) and the legendary shit mountain OT filled with various GIFs of "A to awesome" and people's heads bugging out into the stratosphere during dialogue lol.
And while I haven't finished Andromeda (I'm like one mission in), I think the tortured development did it way more harm than it ever deserved, even with more novice developers. From what I've heard they were undercut by BioWare main studio requesting their help on stuff to wrangle Frostbite and not reciprocating in other aspects, went through two or three lead directors and/or writers, etc. Most of the actual game was made in like 18 months iirc, because development was so mismanaged from the top. Because from what I understand the studio that made Anthem made a lot of technical progress on making Frostbite work for a 3rd person game (and a narrative one at that with lots of talking characters), and the main BioWare studio just siphoned off most of that progress for Inquisiton and Anthem. Not to say that it would've been much better ultimately, but it could've been WAYYYYY worse.
And I'm not sure what Jeff even likes. Does he even like really any "AAA" game much at all? Or does he always prefer AA games or smaller indie titles? Is there any genre he likes in particular?
I think a lot of reviewers come off as very casual "dude-bro", or at least more than I am, and don't appreciate more muted exposition that you might find in deeper RPGs and the like if it's not an "X-babble" they're interested in. And I think some of that is certainly the pressure of having to review or cover however many games in a month or year and not having nearly as much time to sink into them unless the main campaign is literally dozens of hours long even rushing through.
I know I'm much more of a completionist for games I enjoy vs. games I care less about.