Dawntrail is so painful; is it on purpose?

[PaleYonder]

I find the "it's only about the VA" rebuttals disingenuous with all the actual story critique that's been posted already. But I'll respond seriously anyway with my own perspective: It's not about the voice actor or acting; I don't care who an actor is, I'm part of the alphabet faction myself, it'd be idiotic of me to mind. The quality itself was not what I was used to from before, but it's not the point.

Over time I've played the game in three different languages, trying things out, and eventually settled on all-English because I used to really enjoy what the English localiser team did with the extra writing flourishes (not to everyone's taste, but I had fun), and I thought the British theatre-degree actors were overall the best. In Dawntrail, I gradually noticed a difference in quality, saw everyone recommending a switch to JP voices and did that, and while the voice quality improved drastically, the writing did not, and that's what bothers me.
As a disclaimer of sorts, I can understand enough Japanese to rely mostly on the audio while playing, but I keep the text in another language for difficult vocabulary and cause my kanji are very rusty. But I'd say I got enough from the Japanese voices to get the main part, and the written-only text would hardly be changed to such a significant degree as to turn a good story into a bad one. It's a linear game story with all kinds of factors coming together, gameplay, animations, what have you, a few choices of words won't make the difference.
And the overall improvement was barely there, and it didn't save anything about my experience as a player and normally-MSQ-enjoyer.

For the most blatant example:
The infamous uninvited trial entrance was voice-acted well in JP, I thought; she did a really good job at portraying the character in the scene and bringing on all that shounen energy. The problem was that the entrance itself was a horrible idea, narratively, for the player experience, and just on every level. It shouldn't have happened at all. The whole forced setup of Wuk Lamat and Sphene as having any sort of connection didn't land for me. The way they keep talking over the last part of the trial and the aftermath, making it about them, didn't work. The whole section disregards the experience the player comes to expect of the final trial of an expansion. It tries to copy a formula that worked in different contexts, with different characters, in different ways that were organically part of the story (Zenos, Gaia, Emet, "Light the way"...) and simply does not work here. All after forcing the one character in for the whole game and making her unwelcome no matter what. No amount of voice acting skill, and no amount of linguistic flourishes can salvage that.
And that's just one scene; the whole MSQ is full of these moments because the entire setup and structure is incredibly flawed from the ground up.