A classic game that holds up narrativly. While some gameplay elements are a little dated its overall a good game. Throw in a modding community that could rival the elder scrolls series (at least in terms of narative/content mods) and you could be replaying for years.
I for one, really like them and I'm not sure where the hate comes from. So please consider playing the game and deciding for yourself.
I do understand there are purists out there who would rather the game stay 'vanilla'. It would be nice to have an option to disable the changes for those people, but there are mods to do so now I believe.
The engine improvements are great, good enough that I would consider playing this and modding it to be vanilla over playing it vanilla and modding it for a more modern engine. But both are options if you buy this, as you get the original releases as well.
There is also the open source engine GemRB, which is worth looking at. So there is no shortage of options for playing the game the way you want.
Just my 2 cents. I like Beamdog and what they are doing for these games and Neverwinter Nights.
The fact that I can still play this game after more than 30 years is amazing, I got it pretty cheap from GOG so it is even better, the graphics on the EE edition and all the other quality of life improvements really takes this game to another whole level. Thanks a lot GOG!