How Much Personality Should Ryder Have By Default?

By the sounds of it we're going to have a lot more freedom in this without the paragon / renegade system. Just a guess, though. I'm okay with the main character having a somewhat 'set' personality, or a series of 'set' personalities. Generally makes interactions with the plot and other characters more meaningful, imo.

The more up to the player the personality of Ryder is, the better. I'd much rather have a Warden or Inquisitor than a Hawke or Shepard.

I disagree. I found myself having more options and better delivery with the Inquisitor than with earlier Bioware protagonists. 

No you couldn't. Bioware forced so many things on Shepard in regards to personality and emotions. And the whole assume thing with Hawke made it literally impossible to have Hawke react how you wanted all the time. 

Read the reply I just made to the other poster. Inquisitor is a pretty defined character. Especially morally. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. It was right for the time, but not a good precedent for everything else.

And what big choices there are mean little apparently anyways. I didn't like the game, so didn't play DLC/Trespasser. But apparently even your Divine choice doesn't mean a whole lot. Although I don't know the details, admittedly.

I prefer a somewhat 'set' personality like Shepard.. but still have the freedom to adjust it to your own liking

I liked the Warden, but I found the Inquisitor rather flat--the lack of emotional infection in most of the dialogue options was a real issue for me. I didn't have the same issue with the Warden 'cause I could read the lines however I liked, pretty much.

So, since we'll most certainly have a voiced protagonist in Andromeda, I have to say I'd prefer it if we got more of a Hawke than an Inquisitor--I enjoyed the compromise struck by DA2's personality system. There'd always be at least three meaningfully different - from a role-play perspective - options every time the dialogue wheel came up, with the possibility for more with the special options that'd be available sometimes.

That said, I'd prefer either possibility to ME3 Shepard. It sometimes felt like that game might as well not have had a dialogue system for how much auto-dialogue there was, including Shepard voicing opinions that could directly contradict how you'd been able to roleplay her in previous games. And even when the wheel did show up, you generally only had the two options--two options that tended to be far more similar to one another than options at opposite sides of the wheel would be in previous games.

The problem I had with Inqy is that nobody gives a duck about what he's saying. I don't know if it's intentional, but in the end he felt like some sort of promo figure with no real power over anything but goat criminals.

Whatever fits the story and Bioware's overall vision about how much of an RPG they're willing to pay to deliver.  Giving the PC multiple different personalities involves voicing more dialogue options voiced in different ways, etc.  It all adds up.  I certainly take as much freedom in developing my own unique PC as I can get, but I hope they also leave enough room in other parts of the budget to deliver a good game overall with a good plot, interesting cutscenes, good combat, lots of great NPC characters and loads of interraction with those characters.

Now, I never really had that issue with the system myself, but I can certainly see how that'd get annoying--one of my greatest issues with the Paragon/Renegade system in ME1-2, and the way it influenced persuasion options, was how it made it impossible - or, at least, difficult - to roleplay a character who reacted to different situations, well, differently.

I dunno, I suppose further refinement of the system to make the internal consistency mechanic a little less overbearing would help? I think a better balance could be struck between still having your primary personality choice influence the overall tone of your incidental dialogue, while allowing for more variation when the actual options pop up. 

(Though, as I said, I personally didn't really feel like the existing system curtailed my roleplaying options all that much, as compared to Mass Effect - where, even when they were there, the middle options were almost always basically meaningless - or DA:I, where the Inquisitor's general flatness just made me feel like almost all my dialogue options made no meaningful difference to her characterisation.)

I think the Inquisitor in Trespasser struck a nice balance. Definitely seemed to express more emotion while still feeling more under the control of the player. I wouldn't mind if future BioWare protags followed the same template.