The thing that I feel with Paradox is, they put too many weird restrictions in the games. Vicky2 is horribly railroaded, you cannot change capitals, you cannot release vassals, you cannot rename ships or brigades, cannot attack until 5 year truce ends (even at infamy cost) etc. The games are excellent, but restrictions are completely unnecessary and sometimes stupid.
V2 is quite railroaded, but I'm not sure I agree with any of these examples. 1836-1936 didn't see any peaceful vassal releasing as such (I'm not sure it's really even a particularly fitting term for the period and you CAN release colonies or be forced to free other nationalities). Renaming is just cosmetic. And the truce thing is a bad mechanic but not really railroading and instead more a result of other iffy mechanics -- namely infamy was always iffy in my opinion. Railroading like Sardinia-Piedmont getting the crown from the Redshirts even if another Italian is 10x stronger, Hawaii getting insta-annexed by a decision specific to only for the US, and Brazil and the US getting enormous bonuses to immigration regardless of other circumstances are more problematic.
They have remedied most of this with EU4
And I think this is the thing -- they're solving more of these forced-history elements with mechanics that make sense and more dynamic triggers. Hopefully the trend continues and Vicky3 does likewise.
Still, Paradox games endeavor a very different thing than Civ and will likely always have more restrictions. Who knows what TW is going for these days. They've put out some fun games, but I'm not always sure what the vision is besides "cool tactical battles."