Because it's such a stepdown. It's a great game by it's own, sure, but it's an insult to the previous games.

I use this, too. Not all of the time, but at least for games I otherwise cannot get to work.

And yet even using PlayOnLinux for Broken Sword 3, I still cannot get the game to finish installing. Before fully completing installation, the program will pop a window up that will freeze the installation, and the pop-up window will only display four buttons with no text otherwise (and the buttons say "Okay" (or something similar) "Cancel" "Abort" and "Retry"). I can click any button, and it will not matter; the installation will not continue, and the window will stay and not change. I can even click the X to close it and it will still stay up. The only way to stop this is to stop the installation, because it will not continue anyway. Keep in mind, the Foxit Reader and the other such bull crap that pops up during installation of other games still will come up perfectly fine; it's just this one game in which I cannot get past a pop-up, and nobody else seems to have the problem at all, and it happens whether I use PlayOnLinux or just Wine itself.

I am using Linux Mint Cinnamon 14, and my Wine version is 1.4.1. Keep in mind, though I can usually figure stuff out and while I do know a few basics, I can be noobish while dealing with crap like this that I simply can't solve myself. I constantly see advice relating to Linux issues that I can't fully understand because the expert users seem to skip a step quite often thanks to their knowledge and perception of what they think everyone should know and it irritates me to no end, so I figured I'd mention that. Regardless, any help would be appreciated.

That looks like the common issue with the GOG installers v2 under Wine, when they take too much time to complete: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32451
And there's a known way to work around this issue in install script.

But you would have saved time reporting the issue in PlayOnLinux bug tracker, not here where I found your message while looking for something else.

Edit: added the workaround to the script, should work better for you now.

GOG installers should always be executed with /nogui option. The option allows the installer to use a standard, nicer, and working gui instead of the ad-bloated non-working default one.

It could be done easily enough, just one script to change and all installers get their /nogui flag automatically.

But you're exaggerating, the custom installer works good enough when it doesn't take too long to complete (I think it's leaking some kind of resource), which admittedly is hard to guarantee for all hardware; And I disagree that the standard one is "nicer", but that's a matter of taste.

I decided to use it unless I experienced this crash, or someone reported experiencing some, because:
- I don't a priori despise all ads, I find theirs fine, somewhat entertaining and usually about games related to the one being installed;
- The custom installer offers less choices, which is this case is better (user is less tempted to tweak things and break the install script);
- More importantly, I didn't want to make a choice that could harm GOG (even remotely), or that they could object later. I like the way they're doing business, even if they don't (yet?) support Linux.

"When it works good enough" is fine. When it crashes, is not. And while I support gog as one of the few sane(r) companies that sell videogames, I am fairly annoyed they do not bother checking the that INSTALLERS work in Linux. There is no excuse. And I am not exaggerating... (much) ;)

Or a very wild idea - gog could just make a simple installer that unzips files and does one registry entry, so in case things go south with the installer, you can just unzip the data yourself and do the registry entry in wine manually. ;)

I haven't checked if BS 3 and 4 still work during install ever since I moved to Debian Wheezy.
The PlayOnLinux method worked on Debian Squeeze and Xubuntu 12.04. Will report more soon...

Well, the /nogui option is essentially that. And some games do not need the installer at all; (e.g., Broken Sword 2) for them you just need innoextract.

Will BS3 and BS4 be ported to Linux as well?

If you're refering to native ports, probably not. But PlayOnLinux install scripts for GOG versions of both games exist for several years already.