As someone who actually played through the entirety of DA2, I would say the largest issues I had with it were:
1. Blatant reuse of environment pieces; reuse is a necessity for most games, but game designers usually relight, rearrange props, etc. to change the entire mood of a place. In DA2, it's just lazily done, and very frequently
2. Almost no story branching and less customization with party members. You couldn't change their outfit, iirc, because "they'd lose their identity". All of your choices in dialogue usually pointed you back to the same, vanilla conclusion
3. The "world" and scope, in general, felt small. I know many successful games (like Baldur's Gate) took place in a single city, but Kirkwall just fell small for some reason. Contrast to the epic, grand nature of DA1, it was pretty underwhelming
4. The characters, imo, were pretty unmemorable or just plain unlikable. I liked DA1 Anders.. I hated DA2 Anders. I thought the elf girl was stupid, could care less about the elf guy. The only characters I somewhat liked was the Brienne-esque Aveline and the dwarf.
5. Altogether, compared to DA1, the game felt rushed.. this basically includes all of the above.
What I DID like was the faster, responsive combat; spells were very focused in what they did, and usually had an immediate impact on the battlefield. Positioning was very important, and melee had some great abilities this time around.. and yes, the parachuting enemies was cheesy and overdone (which I contribute as a quick-fix for combat, on the devs part).
That said, I am definitely not pre-ordering DA3. I remember being pretty disgusted / betrayed while playing though the game, and vowed to wait on any future Bioware games until they've proven that they give a shit again. I don't care how much hype DAI gets, I'm not handing any money over until the gaming community gives it a thumbs up
