Actually, the "Go to the Island of Mists" quest was not urging you to rush there, because Avallac'h tells Geralt that as long as Ciri is on the island of Mists she's safe.
Well, actually it is quite the opposite.
Avalac'h tells him -
...she's not safe... the Hunt has not found the isle as yet.. [but] 'tis only a matter of time... hurry, hurry... Even Yennefer tells him to
come back quickly. The game itself and the quest design does not "urge" you to hurry though, but that's the general problem of the open-world games in my opinion, not just The Witcher 3.
As for the sex scenes, they are done really, really poorly the way I see it. I mean, that whole thing with our playboy Geralt collecting those silly sex cards in The Witcher was ridiculous. Sex in all 3 games does not have any value whatsoever and is utterly meaningless. In my opinion, the majority of sex scenes are there just for the sake of it. And the brothels.. well, I have yet to enter a brothel in both TW2 and TW3, and I probably never will. What's the point? Besides, those unnatural and forced moans are way too off-putting, for me at least. It wasn't handled well at all.
The politics... I personally don't miss it much, but I wouldn't mind it either. I think the main problem here is the inconsistency between the games. There wasn't a plan for a full-fledged story encompassing all the games, so they had to sacrifice things along the way. But again, if the players are importing saves then those imports should involve some consequences and be of some importance. However, those consequences are not really important at all. And this is, again, because they had to adjust the basis for each of the games for the purpose of the story. There probably won't be any kind of massive changes here either.
"Sometimes you see games that claim they have mature storytelling when really it's adolescent storytelling. It's just tits..."