Couple thoughts on this topic:
Enjoyment of different games is not mutually exclusive.
I can enjoy KCD without logic then demanding that W3 be crap. I like them both for a whole slew of reasons; some of those reasons overlap, and sometimes one game or the other does something better. I’m willing to get into that, but there are other things to be said, first.
Opinion is not fact.
Just because you personally did not enjoy a game, does not mean that the game is crap. Just because someone has a different opinion about a game than you, does not make them wrong. Calling someone unenlightened or ignorant – because they enjoy a game you don’t – makes you an asshole.
The Witcher 3 is an unfair comparison.
I realize the original point of this thread was to highlight things W3 did, that KCD could take inspiration from. That’s great, and the dev’s did exactly that (they’ve said as much on multiple occasions). However, it is really an unfair comparison to make, and here’s why.
W3 is the culmination of a decade worth of work in the Witcher franchise. The team is intimately familiar with the story, its characters, the world in which they live, and the software they are using to create all of that. CDPR, by this point, has multiple games under its collective belt, and years to iron out their bugfix process. They know their fans, they’ve heard what they wanted in a game before it even began to be created. They are familiar with the development process, and they know their limitations as a studio.
If you want a fair comparison, stack KCD against the first Witcher, from 2007. See how Warhorse, as a new studio, compares to the as-of-then largely unknown CDPR. Take a look at the bug list, the graphical glitches, the major crashes (a large portion of which still exist in the game to this day - link). Read about the planned expansions that never got developed, the console version that never happened. Compare Witcher’s 800k sold copies in the first 10 months to KCD’s 1 million+ in the first 4.
You might find, in the weighing of the two, that Warhorse isn’t doing so very bad after all.