Role of Inquisitor and Inquisition in DA4

That wasn't how I saw it at the end of DA2. In the epilogue Leliana emphasises that both the Warden (HoF or Orlesian) and Hawke have disappeared, which she says can't be simple coincidence. In other words, we are meant to assume that something has happened to them both. So, what I recall from the old boards is that people were speculating what had happened to the pair of them and we were more expecting that the next game would involve finding out what happened to them among other things.

Then in DAI, in order to explain the words at the end of DA2, we had Cassandra claiming that the Divine wanted Hawke to lead the Inquisition and we discover that Varric was lying through his teeth. When you consider the fact that had the Exalted March DLC been allowed to go ahead, Hawke's story would have been tied off before DAI, it is obvious that they weren't intended ever to be the protagonist for DAI. Given the title of that aborted DLC it is clear that Cassandra was trying to find Hawke in order to prevent an Exalted March on Kirkwall; the plot for the DLC involving Corypheus taking over Kirkwall by turning the Templar Order into Red Templars. Now it is possible that Corypheus would still have escaped at the end of the DLC because, of course, he can't be killed but the story was meant to be very different and part of the problem with DAI is that in order to resolve these left over thread from DA2, they had to roll over Hawke and other aspects of that DLC into DAI and that is why they didn't really work.

I definitely don't want the Inquisitor back as a non-playable NPC with words put into their mouth based on the choices recorded in the Keep. Either they bring them back in some meaningful way, which I think is unlikely, or don't bring them back at all and stick to codices to explain their whereabouts like they did with the HoF. However, I still maintain they should never have had that confrontation between the Inquisitor and Solas if they did not intend bringing them back. Leave his motives as a mystery for the next PC to discover, have someone else remove the hand to save their life (or let it kill them) and then let them go into honourable retirement believing they had done their job of saving the world.

I was perfectly happy leaving the Inquisitor on the balcony at the end of DAI, either contented with their LI or miserable at having been deserted but with their story finished. Trespasser could be argued to be necessary to explain why the Inquisition was no longer the force it had been in the next game but even that could have been done by codex. The reality was it was really an extended trailer for the next game, which would have been great if it had been brought out in the next couple of years but now it has lost its relevance. I am going to treat the next game as something entirely new, which effectively it will be and do my best to forget anything I know from previous games, so my new hero is not influenced by anything other than what they could reasonably have discovered for themselves.