There is a good bit of truth in what you are saying. Some people think that quantity means quality, that all scenes have the same effect on the story, that characters cannot have their personalities be impacted after notable events, and so no. At the end of the day, it can be easy to see which...
The conditional variables that should exist for many sandbox games seem to track the npcs interactions with the pc have a habit of not all that well or the developers just decide to not really integrate such features into the game to begin with.