On the contrary. I'd give procedurally generated worlds as an example that suffers from exactly the same problem. You realize pretty fast which parts of the game had thought put into them and which ones are just realizations of a random process.

Of course, a story has to be a story that somebody actually wanted to tell. If you just SHOVE mountains of extra characters and extra side quests into a game where they don't belong and have nothing to do with the main story line, of course it's gonna suck.