I liked this feature, and protag felt kind of more alive than it really is. And it's not like it could affect my judging, maybe it's better to react in accordance with previous choices? But I don't really care what my avatar thinks either way.
So while I do agree with you that it gave her personality, this is actually something that was a detriment to us and what we had planned for the game in a way.
We do want Talia (and Faye and Vie and everyone else) to have a lot of personality, feel alive, and to have depth to their character.
However, given that the game has a lot of choices you can make, the values system changing effectively how Talia should feel about things, and those aforementioned 40-ish endings, we also wanted player choices to matter and to stick.
For example, if the player picks a lot of choices that heavily up their Pessimism value, we felt it would be odd if she were to read a databank and be positive and optimistic about it.
Granted, we could have done 7 variants for all the Databank reactions, but that would have been a nightmare; that would be nearly 840 reactions we would need to record, do flags for, and write the script for just for Databanks alone, and trying to untangle that mess plot-wise and path-wise would just be a huge task.
Besides even the above, as I noted, the reactions feel nice the first 5, or 10, or even 20-ish times, but after that, they start to be something that I noticed most players would just mash through, because they started to feel too "hand-holdy", as if we're telling the player that without Talia's explanation, they couldn't possibly grasp the story they were just told.
Fastforward to 4 levels later, and the player would likely be highly annoyed by the reactions, to the point of just straying away from the databanks so they don't have to mash through them anymore.
There's also a third problem which, even if the first two were fixed, was a major problem; the way the game's programmed, the databank reactions are cutscenes. Cutscenes can only play on the map they're played on, so for example, the game can't be told to "load cutscene #20" on a map that that cutscene isn't originally present on.
This creates a huge issue because of the ability to re-read Databanks, which we put in an earlier build and is in this current build as well, and which will carry on into the final game; if the player were to collect a databank but
not read it until later, they wouldn't get the reaction scene, and this would be an even bigger problem not only for player quality of life issues, but also because Talia reacts to certain things within the databanks when she reacts to them, and thus we had flags for those, so you can imagine the tangled up mess that could cause if a player got a databank but didn't read it, and then they encountered a cutscene relevant to that.
(Cutscenes do still change when you read databanks, though.)