ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

It has always frustrating me how critical category such as tinker (injector access, physics / chemistry) is locked behind an unreliable escort in the main campaign.

I'd suggest one of the following:

• Remove tinker escort - at least it's a clear baseline
• Make each escort only appear once - at least all characters will have a chance (ie same one can't appear several times)
• Include the tinker trees (injector access, physics / chemistry) in the new World Knowledge prodigy

I'm puzzled about how it is critical when it shouldn't really exist in the main campaign anyway.

As mentioned, one option was indeed to just remove it from main campaign.

That will cut down divercity of builds, cause I have found EoR a bit of boring last time I played it, and like, if I need to play through it in order to play Tinker - well, that's not very inspiring...

i'm always surprised tinkers are available in AoA, it goes totally against the lore so i would have thought DG wouldn't include it and this would be an addon only thing.
a lot of things people want that go against DG's plan he always says people can just make an addon if they want

As far as I can tell, Select First Escort mod is still working fine in 1.6. Then just go under gameplay options, second tab, pick tinker, and done.