IWD2 - the good and the bad

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I agree, the rush to incorporate the 3E rule set really hurt IWD2 and Pool of Radiance II: Ruins of Myth Dranor. More so the latter than the former.
Both games were obviously originally intended to use 2E, but they changed at the last minute and failed.
Temple of Elemental Evil seems to have done a decent job at first glance, but made things a bit too hard and unforgiving, especially in the beginning.
Then again, first and second level characters are extremely weak and fragile in P&P as well, and the NWN games bypassed that by getting the characters to level 3 in the tutorials.

Still IWD2 isn't that bad an implementation, and while NWN did it better, it wasn't horrible like in Pool of Radiance with the lack of the ability to choose feats and skills. Heck, cleave is so powerful in the beginning portion of the game (until you finish the 4 levels of the Main/Stone/Deep/Light halls) that I tend to use an editor to give it to all my characters along with a choice feat I'd have wanted to pick for each one just because of the aggravation of being unable to choose which ones in which order.

I do agree it would have probably been better to use 2E, but I did kinda like it at first as it was different.