I mostly agree with those arguments you've put Junta, just with less enthusiasm over the idea that's is a power of two forward one back, and on the pitch. The pitch was indeed based on IE games nostalgia, but they strayed very far from said nostalgia where it mattered the most in my opinion, gameplay. PoE doesn't really play like an IE game except for being RTwP. As for the setting, I feel the pitch didn't really make anything clear and considering lines like these :
>
Project Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of
Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of
Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of
Planescape: Torment.
It isn't necessarily clear how much of the setting was to be vanilla D&D and how much alien influences could have been present (torment).
(BTW I don't get the love for Thedas. Sure it's not a carbon copy of D&D but as settings go it's low-imagination and low-effort. They basically took Ivanhoe, added dragons, dwarves, and darkspawn, swapped a few names around, replaced Jews, Gypsies, and Moors with fantasy races, and called it a day.)
I chose DA as an example not because it was especially great, but because even a studio like Bioware can at least show some slight modicum of effort in not being *that* bland. Comparing PoE to DA is setting a low bar of comparison on purpose. I understand the limits set by the kickstarter and wouldn't expect the game to go full on Planescape-style or something, but at least showing some more effort wouldn't really have cost them nostalgia-points.
I don't feel much love for Thedas, but I would be a lot more enthusiastic playing a game made by Obsidian in a setting at least comparable to it, with the added quality of Obsidian's writing and ability to deliver a stronger main storyline on average. (fighting a non-sentient raw force of evil entity as the end boss in DAO was not exactly appealing and neither were the numerous, repetitive encounters of dorkspawns)
The 'basics' like the idea of magic being under some form of organized control and feared by the common man were good, the game just lacked the depth to actually exploit what the setting laid out, which is something that is usually a strength of Obsidian too, I still look fondly to what they did in Mask of the Betrayer when they picked the less commonly talked elements of the FR like the wall of the faithless and turned against it.