If ME:A really is an exploration game with a linear story on the side a la Inquisition...

Why? If there's something I'd expect ME:A to surpass W3 in is precisely gameplay. As much as CDPR improved from the poor gameplay of W1 and the good but not quite there of W2, gameplay is still possibly the weakest feature of W3. I'd even rank ME3 above it.

I thought the game played amazingly smooth and combat was so much fun. NOT as fun as ME3 but fast and dynamic. I never got tired of killing monsters. W1 played like shit, I gave up after 4 hours. Quest design was a total slog too. Go to A, go to B, go back to A, now back to B, back to A. Seriously? I spent hours in one small boring area trying to get into the city! Terrible.
W2 was great fun at the time but W3 is miles better. What I love about W3 is how people react to Geralt, how he can climb cliffs, jumps over fences. That sort of thing. The animations were good. It all felt so alive. The environments weren't just pretty but unmoving stages. That world was breathing. And being inside it felt great. Stormy weather was impressive as hell. Day/night cycle. Swimming. GWENT!!!!
Don't know if this generally falls under gameplay. Maybe it's more world building. In any case, impressive game in that respect.

Everything about DAI was stiff as fuck. Bioware somehow made facial animations WORSE than before. The jump animation was an abomination. Combat had a million special affects but was actually kind of slow. And not fun to me. Like so many people said, DAI looks pretty but the maps are lifeless and dull. There is little to do apart from fighting. No real interaction with anything.

...which didn't bother me THAT much at the time, don't get me wrong. I'm actually fairly easy to please in the gameplay department. I loved crafting! I'm pointing out flaws but I don't hate the game for it. There was plenty to love about DAI. In fact, they put so much awesome banter in it. Lots of cool little details. A lot of love gets poured into every Bioware game. They just totally ignore certain aspects of their games and half-ass them. Which is a pity. Then again I've never played a perfect game. And I don't expect one.

I don't think the combat in MEA will be affected by what we saw in DAI. The base will be ME3, expecially the MP.
From what we saw so far they improved a lot in the graphics department, hopefully animation as well.

As for the open world, it's something we have to wait and see in the game.

I do agree that Andromeda is more appropriately Exploration because you're literally on uncharted territory the whole time, and unlike DA:I it makes sense in that regard, so exploration is a natural part of the story.

That said, I don't expect it to be more exploration-driven gameplay-wise than DA:I. I still expect blips and littered quest markers on the map and each planet feeling like a world area in DA:I and so far the tweets make it sound like it.

But I did enjoy DA:I as far as the Haven section of the game. They've learned their lesson with ME:A (or it's just coincidental) since the Tempest is very compact, exactly what I enjoyed about Haven over Skyhold in DA:I, so all your war table like stuff and all companions are not several buildings apart from each other, making you either fast travel and sit behind loading screens or going the long way by foot just to have a dozen of 2 minute conversations or checking in when nobody has anything new to say.

I really hope I can keep myself from being completionist in ME:A if its areas are like in DA:I where there's a main objective, repeated tasks like setting up colonies (aka Keeps) or camps, extracting Remant stuff for fuel so we can launch the next mission on our Galaxy Map.

I think where ME:A won't surpass W3 is in graphics and animation. I never really thought too much about it except i thought ME3 and DA:I had really jarring moments, especially because the graphcis had advanced while the animations hadn't done so enough, but W3 was just impressive in every way. It's like GTA-levels of things moving and feeling alive and the facial animations look incredible for something that's seemingly procedurally generated.

I just much prefer BioWare titles' overall flow of interactive dialogue though. I could do without the terrible mocap animations though. For some reason BioWare can't figure out how to make scenes where characters stumble or move into things. They always end up making these awkward movements as if there's a swarm of bees over their heads. I'm thinking of several moments I just reexperienced in DA:I and in particular when Maya Brooks shows up at the Sushi place in Citadel DLC. It's their mocap direction; it's awful. I think they have only stuntmen for motion capture performances but they don't have very good instructions or choreography for them, so they end up with really exagerrated and overacted body movements.

But then on the flipside there were some moments in ME3 where the animations became really impressive all of a sudden, like when Kaidan kisses your hand during his romance and makes an endearing look - made me have the biggest grin because it looks to real for everything else in the game!.

But I think especially eye-area animations need to be looked through. DA:I nails accurate mouth movement most of the time except there's a bit of delay on it for some reason, but the eyes are often really monotonous and sometimes they look angry for no reason and stuff. The worst one is often in ME3 they make a shrug animation of some sort and turn their head away but the eyes are still tracking the character being spoken to, so they look dead in the eyes. Actually ME1 was absolutely incredible when it came to just facial animations in static camera angles. They had those really awkward animations when they left a conversation as if they were rolling eyes almost, but otherwise it looked super smooth, to the point where I've always wondered if there's some third party software powerign their digital acting in ME1.