You know, I tried to play this without cheats for quite a while. Also tried to not look at the walkthrough too much.
You can really tell that the game is a product of incremental updates. The early/mid game progression suffers quite a bit. The character doesn't keep up with the increasing demand of many quests as they become available (often super early). It seems likely that when these high lvl quests got added to the game, most people playing update by update would have been at the appropriate level. New players going through the game naturally won't be anywhere near those levels. Lvl 15/20/30+ quests are being unlocked way before low lvl quests. You are juggling a huge amount of concurrent character arcs, sometimes with time limits.
The idea of a sandbox with so much freedom like this is probably to give a sense of immersion, but when you have to hold off on a supposedly urgent quest indefinitely to do other stuff, that immersion is lost. If you want to raise the level in a reasonable rate, you would probably have to put everything on hold and grind some fights which would also kinda break immersion.
Then there is the d20 system. It's absurdly punishing, especially when everything is gated by Energy which you can only regain by sleeping. I found myself save scumming those rolls quite a bit, so I just ended up cheating after about about 10 hours into the game. I'd say 10 hours is plenty of time to get a feel for it.
A brutal and punishing world is cool if there is a reasonable sense of progression. But the game misses the mark on that front. There are barely any quests offering character improvements. I still haven't seen anyone teaching the other weapons/shield/skills. Money is a constant issue. Energy is a constant issue. Exp is incredibly slow, and the enemies even scale with your lvl. The conditions for progressing certain characters are not always intuitive. Many characters have cross over requirements with the progression of others.
At some point, I realized I was totally in the "scene hunting" mindset, rather than the RPG mindset. That's when I knew that it was time to cheat.