I haven't played in a while - like last time I picked it up Berwyn was still the black mage companion rather than a generic big tiddy sorceress - and my impression after seeing the state of the game is 'not a power fantasy because the companions all have better stats and builds than your PC can get for a very long time'. Spellblade Cait just wrecks everything.
Tweaking the companion sets to be this much better was probably intended to balance out the party members not having equips, but...there isn't much in the way of good equipment. I've done the forest, the hornets, and the centaur quests and have yet to find anything like a good set of armor or a weapon better than the sanctified gladius and that's fallen way behind for damage. I have to buff up twice just to match the kind of damage the companions can casually do. You're better off playing support and letting all the waifus do the heavy lifting.
On a somewhat related note: I don't even mind the idea of NPCs dating each other &c but the Azzy companion material comes off to me as poorly handled at every stage. It starts with a blatant push to endear the character to the player, moves through a whole dungeon to open her up as a companion, and the first thing you see when she finally joins you is "actually I'm really into and want to date one of the NPCs". ...I have to wonder what the writer was thinking; that's both an egregiously bad idea on his part and a failure on the staff's part for not telling him to reconceptualize it from the ground up. There was no indication whatsoever in the content leading up to her companion material that something like this was coming. This gets dumped in the player's lap and explicitly presented as a choice between not seeing it (but knowing it's still canonically happening), watching it happen right in front of you, or thruple dating. These are all -very- divisive ideas and not something that should ever be presented as a curveball in a waifu game.
There's a wide gulf between companions like Cait or Brint having other encounters offscreen while showing clear favoritism toward the PC and designing one of the companions around having an explicit and detailed romantic relationship with an NPC right in front of the player. At the very least this should have had indications prior to recruitment that it was going to be explicitly poly/NTR themed and written so that the build-up was less explicitly romantic. The way to do this is to give the player every indication of what it's going to be before diving in, present a chance to avoid both the NPC relationship and an explicitly romantic relationship with the character (less people would mind the idea of a companion they don't care about dating an NPC), and build up some attachment to the NPC before going full tilt ahead with a possible thruple situation. Letting something like this into the game in the form it took also hits those "I just want to write my OC fiction" notes that the game is plagued with.
