I admit I was disappointed as well. The original took me over 60 hours to complete. Awakening took little more than 10. Awakening is simply put not a very good expansion as it feels more akin to episodic content than an expansion should be. In fact, other games like Fallout 3 have much better integrated DLC than what Bioware deigns to call an expansion nowadays. Throne of Bhaal remains the seminal example of what an expansion should be. Completing the plot development of the original while adding new content immediately accessible to a new game.

Awakening should have retrofitted the crafting system and skills and spells back to the original campaign. It did not, and that is where it's biggest failure lies.

Balance seems to have been tossed out the window as even on nightmare difficulty, I never even bothered to pause and issue orders relying solely on auto-attacks. Archery was a sub-optimal build in the original, but the developers had apparently listened to the cries of Legolas fanboys and added a super-saiyan mode in the form of the accuracy talent.

That one little innocently named toggle ability essentially triples your dps, turning a short bow into a machine gun. My party consisted of 3 archers cum machine gunners and a healbot that just waltzed through anything. One could say I was meta-gaming, but the other classes are not any less overpowered, they simply require a little more than auto-attack.

The plot was nonsensical and really only justifies one sentence considering how paper thin it was.