I've come into this discussion rather late, and I admit, that I didn't bother reading through the entire thread. So if I'm echoing someone else, please forgive me and ignore this.
I was quite young when I played BG and the rest of the gang, for that matter, and I often, especially in BG2, felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of responsibility for other peoples lives, that were thrust upon my poor hapless character at every turn. This ment that every now and then, I had to stop playing for weeks at a time. Since then I've often thought about ways to make the quest pressure a little lighter, without loosing the great variety and overall amount of quests, which I whole-heartedly agree, is a good thing...
My thought: Have (some) quests become available only after certain other quests, which have nothing at all to do with, and indeed may not even be in the same region as, eachother... This, I believe, will ensure that the player doesn't have 800,000,000 quests to deal with at once, but may limit it to a few hundred thousand. AND (again, It's my believe) will create a better illusion of a real, dynamic world, where things happen, seemingly at random, so that one npc who might have a quest for you will not have it to begin with, because the event that sparked the quest "haven't happended yet." Also, in consecutive play-throughs, all quest will not be available at exactly the same time...
