Except this is definitely not true according to canon. If it was, Revenge of the Sith would have gone something like this: PALPATINE: Execute ... order Sixty-six CLONE TROOPERS: [shoot at Jedi] JEDI MASTERS WHO LET'S REMEMBER ARE BASICALLY THE MOST POWERFUL JEDI IN THE GALAXY: [Flawlessly deflect blaster bolts and take out Clone Troopers] PALPATINE: You know, I really should have seen this one coming.

Pretty sure the Dark Side is, in fact, intrinsically evil. Pretty sure that's why they call it the Dark Side.

While I agree that the characterisation of KotFE is shonky, I think the OP is dead wrong about the reasons. "Characterisation" does not mean "long dialogues like in Fallout" (which, by the way, was in no way fully voiced - I seem to recall that exactly zero of your companions were fully voiced in the original, and only Sulik, Marcus and Myron were voiced in 2). As the OP points out, the game quickly and efficiently establishes the personalities of the major players and that is what caracterisation means. The fact that you don't get to sit them down and ask them where they grew up or what weapons they're skilled with doesn't make them less well characterised. Where the characterisation falls down is in the character of the PC, where the plot basically assumes that no matter what class you are and how you played your original story, you're this generic Hero type. Characters who are loyal to nothing but credits, or who have devoted their entire lives to spreading pain and carnage to everything in front of them, or whose entire modus operandi is staying in the shadows are suddenly thrust into this position where they're basically Commander Shepard, standing up and telling a room full of Jedi and Sith that We Fight Or We Die.

I suspect that some of the confusion arises because particular types of behaviour will give you LS points in some contexts and DS points in others, especially in faction levelling content. Republic levelling content and most neutral flashpoint or expansion content tends to provide the choice between a self-sacrificing option (for LS points) or a pragmatic-but-heartless option (for DS points). Empire levelling content tends to provide the choice between a pragmatic-but-heartless option (for LS points) or a needlessly psychopathic option (for DS points). So whether Lana is LS-aligned or DS-aligned essentially depends on what content you're in (or, if you want to get extremely meta, what content she levelled through).

I think the major difference here is that in the original KotOR, the plot would still have made sense even if you *didn't* turn out to be Revan. It explained some little minor things that you could easily write off as genre conventions anyway, but it isn't like the plot felt like a pile of unadulterated nonsense before the big twist, because "you're trying to stop the big bad Sith Lord" is perfectly sensible as plots go. That's very different from a plot that fundamentally doesn't make sense, where you're relying on information coming out later that *makes* it make sense retroactively. Darth Vader turning out to be Luke's father added depth and nuance to a story that already worked. Valkyrion/Vitiate turning out to be the PC's father would explain one thing (why he's so obsessed with the PC) but raise a whole lot more questions (why are his other children so much more powerful than you, why didn't all this come out years ago, and so on) and still not explain a bunch of others (what's the deal with the emergency backup empire, for example?) Now as it happens, I don't mind that the plot is a little silly, I kind of expect that from Star Wars plots. And I certainly don't mind that there's a Force Using order that's not Jedi or Sith, but then I'm old enough to remember a time when Vader was just a "Dark Jedi" and "Darth" was just his first name.

Part of it, I suspect, is that "power" in Lore is a lot less measurable than in games. In Episode 1 Darth Maul fights Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon, and very nearly beats them. In Episode IV a much older Obi-Wan faces Darth Vader at (presumably) the height of his powers and the two seem evenly matched. Either Darth Maul was so much more powerful than Vader that he was the equal of two Jedi Knights, while Vader could only ever fight one at a time, or Obi-Wan in old age was essentially as powerful as his old master and his younger self put together. Or (as is actually the case) the fight scenes are put together based on what looks cool, not on any real notion of who should logically be able to beat whom. To overthink things for a moment, it's also worth pointing out that while Darth Malgus goes up against four PCs at once, he also ... well ... loses. A reasonable interpretation of both the Lore and the Game Mechanics is that Malgus is *about on level* with the PCs - maybe slightly better, but he has home team advantage - and that there need to be four PCs not because one alone couldn't defeat him in a lightsaber duel, but because whichever faction is setting up that mission wants to *guarantee* success.