Morally grey choices/characters and side stories are aplenty in the Witcher 3, they're just not as noticeable since they don't feature as much in the main story branch.
Did I day they weren't present at all? Read it again. My disappointment was towards existence of stupid evil main characters, whose motivations are the same as villains from the children's stories: being evil for the sake of evilness, which, consequently, leads to primitive and obvious black and white choices with strictly better choice present. If you're a fan of superhero comics you'll feel right at home here but that doesn't mean it is a mature content.
As for the 'dumbing' down of politics, I would prefer to describe it as 'streamlining' the story a bit.
As I just wrote right above your post: streamlining would have been avoiding political themes like in HoS, not making it stupid. They left a lot of politics there but made it stupid, which is worse than not including it.
Politics for the sake of politics can easily bog down the pacing of both the gameplay and story
I see you're giving an expert opinion here. Then let's start with examples of games with the politics was for the sake of politics and where it ruined a gameplay and a story. Please.
I can see CDPR only included what was necessary in relation to Geralt's journey to find Ciri, why do we need to know anything else?
Because we all can see there were no side quests in the game... /sarcasm
Geralt is not a politician, I see no issues with bypassing the intricacies of the political game in order to put more focus on the story and characters at hand.
Reminder: the absence of politics is not equal to bad representation of politics.
If you're comparing the game's writing to Andrzej Sapkowski's novels and lore
Novels and lore are important but I compared TW3 to previous witcher games.
That said, there is plenty to improve on and CDPR is still a fairly young company
Incorrect, they are over 15 years old and, at the moment, they are the top CRPG maker in the world.
I think the bigger issue here is that you're comparing literature to a video game with very little understanding of how a story in a video game is different than what is written for a book.
You need to pay more attention to details. The phrase about the literature was my counterargument against the statement that entertainment media is subjective therefore cannot be objectively evaluated. It was not about comparison to TW3 in any way.
I'm not saying W3's writing is anywhere perfect (I'll be the first to admit it has plot issues), but to call it "childish" is grossly simplifying its issues and to overlook the remarkable achievement it is as a complete package.
Again, you're not paying attention to details. I called it teenage oriented, like many other games, but still the best RPG available today. This is quite a difference from calling the game childish, don't you think? The witcher games stood out of the crowd because they were adult oriented and it was one of their distinctive feature, a difference maker. TW3, with exception of HoS, lost its main attribute, which was the reason why those games were loved so much by many.
Radovid is far more interesting as a villainous psychopath than he is as a King and ruler of Redania
I suspect you're in minority here.