Those two things are what most put me off.

The art style was extremely colorful and cartoonish/childish/WOWish. I just hate the influence of WoW (and Blizzard in general) on other games.

The item-level design is all over the place. I get this feeling with D:OS (and other games) when I see these big numbers such as "658 PHYSICAL ARMOUR" that game designers don't know what they are doing. They are just increasing the number as you progress. It's not meaningful. Usually, JRPGs tend to do that a lot. Once I read this post in which the developers of RB:AotF say something that makes a lot of sense:

"The core system design for a solid RPG is quite a challenging task and the many failed, unbalanced attempts are a testament to that. Computer game designers tend to underestimate the difficulty to create such a complex beast."

And that's why I like cRPG based on PnP RPG so much, they are based on more solid systems.

I finished both games, and I prefered the first one mainly because the combat was not so cahotic. My thought on the second was that they had overdue the enviromental complexity. No need to have in every combat pools of oil or water to have some fun. I have played both in the hardest setting (not the permadeath), and found that the first beacame easy halfway through, the second only the last 4/5 of the game were easy.
All in all both excelente games, a little too long.
My favorite of the series was the "gothic" one, I don´t remember the name (Divinity II?), but I loved the questing and exploring of that one.

Divinity II: Ego Draconis, also known as The Dragon Knight Saga when combined with the expansion. It's my favorite Larian game as well.

Absolutely. DKS was a masterpiece, but they spent money so foolishly that Sven blames DKS for their problems but it wasn't the issue. That game is masterful and the DOS stuff doesn't come close.

DOS isn't bad but should be called Endless Elemental Encounters instead. E3 has always been popular, so the title should work.

My big problem with DOS is the length of the combat. A fodder fight can take 3-4 minutes.

I never felt it that way. I abandoned DOS because I still had far more killed party members in each combat than otherwise.

According to you, I obviously did something very wrong ?