The main problem is people keep comparing WRPGs to JRPGs like they're the same genre. They look like they are (wow, the names are almost the same!) but they aren't, really. The thing is: Role Playing Game was "invented" in america, with "pen-and-paper" Dungeons and Dragons. Back in the days, RPGs didn't have that much focus in "choice" and "character creation" from a plot standpoint. You had choices, but they were all pretty much related to combat and survival in dungeons (choosing attacks, customizing equipment). In truth, there was not a lot of plot development, really. It was all about killing big Dragons and getting XP. The RPG was then transported and localized to Japan, in the form of eletronic games. See, for them, RPGs were pretty much created as videogames (pen-and-paper RPGs weren't that popular in Japan). For japanese people, the "template" for what RPG means is Dragon Quest I, Final Fantasy I, Phantasy Star etc. They evolved from that primitive dungeon crawling into creating memorable characters and stories... All the "Non-linear plot, non-linear character creation, huge amount of interaction with the player etc" was not what defined a RPG back then, that's what define more recent pen-and-paper western RPGs, and that's what Western Eletronic RPGs try to simulate.
The thing is: although the JRPG genre was created inspired by the first western pen-and-paper RPG adventures, it gained a life of its own. They only took reference for the first games, and after that, evolution in JRPGs was totally independent from the evolution of western RPGs, eletronic or not. But when it comes to western eletronic RPGs, they're highly dependent on their "pen-and-paper" counterparts even now.
"Character creation", back when RPGs were invented, meant basicly to choose classes/abilities for your character. "Character interpretation" meant basicly to govern your character through a Dungeon, not to make moral choices that affect your karma or anything like this.
More recent additions to the pen-and-paper RPGs changed that paradigm. Systems like the "storyteller" (introduced in 1991, way after eletronic RPGs were introduced in Japan) had a heavy emphasys on interpratation and interection between NPCs and the player. The focus of this system is basically to build a character from scratch and to interpret him deeply, even psychologically, and from the interactions between players and NPCs, construct a plot, a "chronicle". That's pretty much what western eletronic RPGs have been trying to simulate until now, and that's the reference western people have for the term "RPG".
TLDR: Bioware is dumb to compare a JRPG to a modern Western RPG template. Period.
