This franchise is going downhill, EW1, 2 and 3 were the only good ones, the castle system was a great feature and removing it has only made this worse.
This game is one of the best games I've ever played. It is painfully long, (awesome) but the premium isn't really worth buying in my opinion, your basically paying for a harder difficulty and some amulets.
I don't think the problem with all of your games is that you don't spend enough time on them. I think its probably because every character has the same square head and looks similar to every other character..