The repeating character models thing is big straw man.
It's typical reviewer fodder, an example of bad over reporting. In reality, it is something you notice once, go 'oh, I do see that they reused these models' and then it exits your mind, because it's only street people who have the 'problem', and there is enough diversity there considering you don't need much. The main characters are all well done and distinctive.
Load times are long...ish. Nowhere near Gothic3; ten to fifteen seconds if you have a sensible harddrive setup (pagefile on a seperate drive from game/os). It gets kinda irritating, but the RPG is so good I'd be lying if I said it wasn't worth it.