My little mini-review after however many hours in the game.

I played it up to the point where I accidentally activated the 'a woman's lot' DLC and played through that. There was apparently a little icon somewhere to warn me I was playing into a DLC, but since they didn't tell me ahead of time what that icon was or to watch out for it, I didn't notice. Once in the DLC you either have to play through the entire DLC or sacrifice whatever progress you had between your prior save point in the main game and when you entered the DLC.

The best way to describe this game is "tedious". I don't think I've run into anything this tedious since I had to read Buddenbrooks for a lit class in college. There are many many many cut-scenes, and all have bad English lip sync and stiff AI-generated "acting". It's particularly bad in A Woman's Lot because you are playing as a woman character and you soon notice that every woman in the game has a very fake-looking way of bobbing their head when they come to the end of every sentence. It's bob-bob-tilt (the head) for every "full stop" in the dialog. It's worse than a one actress nodding to another one to prompt them to say their line next.

It's pretty necessary to play most of the cut scenes to be able to follow the plot, but that doesn't make it enjoyable to sit and watch them. More like work.

And there are gameplay aspects that contribute to the tedium. For example, unlike most games, the quest markers don't point you directly to what you want. That's a little bit good the first couple times, but when you spend a couple hours wandering around in the dark trying to find something that you have only a general area pointer for, it's just boring, annoying and tedious.

There is a mod you can get that lets you 'save anywhere' (nearly). It's pretty much mandatory if you want to maintain your sanity. It installed easily under gog. There are install instructions for it (on nexus) that are for steam, but as long as you can find where the game directory is under gog, you're good.

I got the game on special, I paid under US$3 for it, so I don't feel like I got poor value for the money, but the game just seems to suffer from 'high principles' of the designers. That is, the designers had some notions about the Proper way to design a game, and they went off and built this thing that follows their Rules for Design, not bending them in any way to accommodate other secondary requirements, like that the game be fun. So what you have is an experience that the designers dictated, with basically no latitude to experience the content in any other way, and no way to make it fun for you if their idea of fun doesn't match yours.

So it's just very tedious, and not much fun, and I can't bring myself to go on with it.

You are just being OCD and being a completionist or something, which I was too.
There are plenty of faults in the game, and plenty of things that can be frustrating.
For example, you have to learn how to parry/riposte from the trainer, but if you skip a couple things and start the horse murder mystery quest, you'll have to do a substantial chunk of story without having the ability to fight well.

Grab your bow, call your dog, and go walk out into the woods.
Don't know what you're complaining about bobbing heads?
I also started the woman's lot DLC without realizing it was a separated story DLC. The only complaint I had there was that I wanted to get back on track with my story, but you will eventually and from what I remember the woman's lot DLC was pretty good.

The cut scenes, voice acting, are all well done, so again not sure what the problem is there. The stories are usually rich and the game is plot driven.

I had tons of complaints, truly hated the game when I started it because combat, but ended up loving it and would consider it one of the greatest games of all time. Maybe try it again a little later, and try not to play it on the preconceived rails the games provides for you. Get lost a bit and go on your own adventure.