I feel like Nihilus was a really bad choice and just a placeholder for an actual villain because they didn't bother with any development, they used in-lore reasons for why he couldn't talk and his character was essentially incomprehensible in his motives aside from The One Thing™ 🙄, and they just kinda dropped him in towards the end and it's supposed to be a big deal because he's... kinda spooky I guess? Oh wait, some characters also tell you throughout the game that he's a big deal and you should invest in his character because they said so.

Yeah. Nihilus also felt like a "force of nature" villain more than anything. Don't know if I remember wrongly, but I couldn't really find out what his actual character or motives were when talking to visas marr, other than just consuming everything like a wild animal. The final confrontation with him was really anticlimactic and underwhelming.

Kreia was supposed to be the fleshing out of the whole fall to evil thing and she did an okay job of it most of the time. If you played the game purely lawful good then she would have been frustrating but if you played it other ways or you weren't certain of your path then she is a more interesting deuteragonist than Bastila, who would just demand that you always take the lawful good path and chide you if you didn't, which wears thin really quickly.

The thing is, I could never really please Kreia enough so I opted to spite her, to intentionally decrease her influence as low as possible to "unlock" the various story dialogue lines. Her hyper-selfish, social darwinist obsession with rugged individualism and freedom irritated me more than anything Bastilla did TBH. Obviously not saying that all choices that would align with what kreia would do are bad - far from it, e.g. some of the "smart"/"manipulative" choices that kreia would approve of - I just don't want to be constantly lectured by space libertarian, especially when helping or trusting in others - the whole point of the exile's strength in making bonds with others. And I find it ironically pathetic that someone so obsessed with this stupid idea of "freedom" was so drawn to a force user whose greatest strength was their ability to bond and connect with others. She honestly comes across as one of those deranged people trying to separate themselves from society, who hates the very fundamental dependence of all life on each other (and hence the crazy plot to "kill the force" which binds all things). I also still maintain that the game was excessively sympathetic in its portrayal of kreia.

She was, imo, a very clear swing-and-miss at representing something close to representing the concept of Wu Wei because the problem therein is to have a fallen/ultimately evil character who also represents neutrality/neutral-good - those two sit it direct contradiction with one another so it got muddled up in the story.

Yes. Kreia is IMO the most sociopathic and repulsive character in the game, so the writers attempting to portray her as "gray" completely failed from my pov.

The game was really reaching for gritty realism (see: Atton being an actual representation of a rogue character rather than a caricature of a rogue who once was self-interested but decided to join up and now they're part of a merry band of do-gooders without any real justification or development, also the drab setting for most of the game) and a subversion of the tropes (which, in combination with the gritty realism, often devolved into outright edgelordism) but it often fell short of this lofty vision.

Which is kinda funny because star wars is this very cheesy space fantasy that clearly isn't meant to be taken seriously. Introducing "gritty realism" into this series has to be done very carefully to make it work, but as you outlined here they didn't succeed in the case of kotor 2.

Side note, I did appreciate the mechanic of influencing through hatred as much as respect. I remembered that it was very easy to make mical absolutely hate you and thus acquire a light side jedi party member relatively quickly.