The Winter Palace quest is kind of a mess

I've just finished with the Winter Palace on my current (and only second ever) playthrough, and I have to say that I found what I assume was an attempt at a twisting and complicated conspiracy plot to be kind of a mess in terms of gameplay. I don't know if the fandom generally holds it in high regard, but I have a feeling I'd have missed something important if I wasn't using a walkthrough.

First of all, I like to have some motivation for picking up random items beyond just "because it's a video game." If something is in somebody's private residence - and if they aren't using their private residence as an HQ for mass murder (e.g. most of the merc strongholds in ME2) - I generally leave it alone. So why am I going around picking up all these random halla statues? What do I want them for if I didn't know they were needed to open doors in the palace? And come to think of it, who designed this security system in the first place such that any randomly nosy person can hack it?

Second, while it avoids the problem of the Orzammar conspiracy plot in DAO, which makes it impossible to actually figure out who's lying and expose them, it still relies on opening a bunch of random doors and on the characters drawing conclusions that, at the very least, aren't immediately apparent to the player. I'd never have found Celene's locket (or picked up enough statues to open the door to where it's hiding) if the walkthrough hadn't told me that it was important, and while the player can hear the soldier in Celene's room calling out, the characters don't seem to acknowledge it at all, and apparently there's no option other than to ignore it if you don't have enough halla statues - in a game where your warriors are strong enough to kick their way through solid rock. Then when I go to talk to Briala, one of my dialogue options is to accuse her of having both Gaspard's and Celene's ambassadors murdered, and she seems to admit it. But while I'd found a lot of dead bodies, I don't recall seeing anything that clearly identfied two of them as ambassadors or to Briala as having ordered their deaths.

Third, while I ended up taking the "all of you are at fault" option and making Celene, Gaspard, and Briala agree to a truce, my own reasoning had more to do with Celene having apparently ordered an elven alienage purged than with the alleged incriminating evidence against her, namely that she'd set a trap for Gaspard. But frankly, that seems like pretty small stuff compared with all the blood on Gaspard's and Briala's hands. Personally, I tend to agree with Cassandra about the Orlesian nobles' "game" - it's pretty repulsive and I'd rather have nothing to do with it. If this were a Witcher game where your character doesn't have much political clout, I could understand why I'm relatively powerless here, but the Inquisitor seems like (s)he should be able to do something more than just negotiate a backroom deal, and I gather that being blunt about what's going on and getting thrown out is a game-over state.

Which brings me to the "court approval" dynamic, which I appreciate in theory but I don't think it actually works that well. Given all the scheming going on, drawing suspicion by disappearing for a period of time seems like it should be a more black-and-white thing - either you're gone long enough that somebody's personal guard grabs you and demands answers, or it goes largely unnoticed. Instead you kinda sorta draw suspicion but can counterbalance it by dancing with Florianne or otherwise schmoozing. Also, does nobody overhear all the fighting and killing going on just around the corner from the ballroom and vestibule?

I realize that investigations in video games are a difficult thing to pull off, in that there's a fine balance between too much player guidance (in which case you don't feel like you're actually investigating) and not enough (in which case you can just end up lost). The Winter Palace seems to aim for giving you a fair amount of freedom, but with some arbitrary "cutoff points" that can easily force you into making a decision with incomplete information and/or incomplete understanding of what your character has actually discovered.