I mean you still do ultimately get out what you put in. Can you make Hayden into a chain smoking angry cynic? Yes, you heartless monster.
I've done at least one with Remy where he was Mirel's brother and after a bit of reinforcement rather than constantly hitting on me, she was giving me noogies and complaining that Mom liked me best. When she's firing on all cylinders, she great and probably has the wittiest and most sarcastic personality of the group.
I'm also a big Orson fan but also I kind of like the fact he's out of the way? It's incentive to get up and get moving if you want to and to get out of the village.
I mentioned that in the post, you can "train" the NPC's but after a while this falls off and they revert back to their default personality. On that note, you shouldn't have to train them anyway imo, it kind of defeats the purpose of having different characters if you have to mold them to not get them to bleed together personalitywise.