What do you mean by "better party support"? The only problem I can see is that the game doesn't let you use NPC skill in places where it should (item breakdowns, building stuff on the Hawk, repairing T3)
As it works currently, you pretty much always control your protagonist, adding party members to increase the number of blades or guns a protagonist can bring to bear in a combat situation. In party based adventuring, you do (at least I hope so) get the feel of being a team instead of a souped of protagnist. It's a bit hard to explain, but I think the biggest problem is the POV and the onedimensional combat, whereas if you could zoom out and up from the combat (and de-attach the &^%$ camera from the character that is currentlly "active") you might be able to apply a bit of tactics to it. Like sending in your one or two tanks as a screen for your ranged guys, whether these then lob grenades or shoots fireballs.
As it is now, you usually ends up with a 'lump" of 1-3 characters, where you focus on one of them and hope the other two doesn't get you all killed in the process (by getting trapped by obstacles or blocking each other, allowing only one guy to attack etc.). Heck, even Fallout was more fun getting yourself killed by Ian in. So, what I'm probably missing (in the combat aspect of the game) is the expansion from one (headlong rush towards enemy) to two (using the area in both x and y directionsm terrain and different ranges of attack) dimensions.
I thought some slightly random thoughts in another post once, just speculating how Kotor (1&2) would have been, if designed for something like the ancient Infinity engine because I missed party based adventuring... it was fun speculation but just that, speculation.