Same here. I liked the first one, and it's charm, but found it a bit boring. The praise for the sequel has me very curious, but hesitant.
I see this opinion often in relation to Divinity 1 so I'll touch upon it:
I'm sort of in the same boat? I mostly enjoyed the combat in Divinity 1 but found the story quite boring, the writing extremely poor, and quite a large number of design elements too confusing or obsufucated to be useful or even interesting (such as crafting). I only played it up until after the first town, grew tired of the story and the game and dropped it. So about 10-15 hours worth of playtime.
Divinity 2 in comparison vastly improves on almost every element of the game. The writing is much better and also far less dense. So not only is there less of just paragraphs upon paragraphs of text being thrown at you like the original, the actual quality is significantly improved as well. The tone is a bit more serious and far more fitting to the world. The main story is more engaging and interesting.
But what improved perhaps the most? The storytelling and overall flow. The main story serves as a vehicle for all the smaller stories found throughout the world. It's really sort of like The Witcher 3 and the Persona series in that regard. And because the world is so densely packed with stuff to do, you just stumble upon secrets and stories, all relatively self contained and interesting to do, but that feed into the larger narrative.
And that makes the overall loop more interesting and fun to engage in. You want to explore every nook and cranny because the stories and secrets are interesting, which lead to cool rewards, more secrets and interesting combat encounters. And because a lot of the side stories can be completed within an area you find, there's also a feeling of near immediate satisfaction as you not only discover a hidden story but complete it within a relatively short time frame.
Everything else also saw dramatic improvements as well, from combat (more freedom, more interesting classes to mix and match) to crafting. It feels like smarter expansion of gameplay elements found in the original game. And 2 shows that sometimes less is more is the perfect mantra. There are no more crafting levels for examples, and that immediately improves that gameplay subsystem. More, crafting no longer feels necessary but a nice side system to occasionally dabble in which alleviates a bit of the inventory management issue (I just sell everything and make money, I don't even bother crafting now).
I'd honestly consider this, personally, an Assassin's Creed 1 to Assassin's Creed 2, or an Uncharted 1 to Uncharted 2 kind of jump in quality. And I'm hoping people who didn't enjoy Divinity 1, perhaps for the same reasons as me, also find 2 as compelling as I do.
