I agree, DA2 wasn't a terrible game. It's still a Bioware game so it has amazing dialogue and interesting characters, but it just happened to follow a game like DAO and not live up to it.
Yeah. It had its flaws (briefly, since it's been done to death, excessive area re-use and three-wave attacks in particular did my head in) but the characters were well developed and interesting, as you say: qualities I'm actually missing rather a lot in Skyrim, for the record...