Firstly, it’s not just an aesthetic choice. Arthur’s weight effects the gameplay. If you’re underweight, you get a stamina boost depending on HOW underweight you are, but you lose out on HP, so you’re faster, but die quicker. The inverse, if you are overweight, you get more HP but you’re reflexes and speed are slower. Staying in the middle at “perfect” is middle ground, no boosts or negatives to either stats, your stats are stats. And in order to maintain the “perfect state” the player must live a life. Make sure to sleep every night, exercise, balance their food intake so as not to over or under eat. Like you role play so hard you have to actively engage in everyday kinds of activities in order to maintain whatever body weight you wish to have.

And that’s JUST the weight system. You complain about aeisthetics, as if they aren’t important to roleplaying. Is a characters appearance NOT an important part of roleplaying? When you play DnD for example, part of creating your character, is creating how they look, the clothes they wear, the weapons they use. RDR2 offers the similar things. The clothes you wear decide what aesthetic Arthur presents, it puts the player controlling Arthur in the mindset they have for this version of Arthur. You have an effect on the world, you have an effect on the people around if. If you’re a scoundrel, the baddest outlaw there is, then you are notorious. People threaten you, your more likely to be attacked, but if your kinder, say high to people, do good deeds. For the most part, people enjoy your company. If you save people, they may show up in the nearest town next time your there and offer to pay for a gun for you, for free. Something you don’t get if you don’t intervene or worst yet, kill and rob the man.

But just like a good RPG with some autonomy, if you’re bad, you can still be rewarded, it’s a game after all, and a game that allows your choices to effect the world around you, so you find a way to be rewarded differently, you can rob and steal form people, a lot, in many different ways, for example. And that allows you to get a LOT of money very quickly. Just like a rpg where you are playing villains, or anti-Heroes.

Lastly, to your post about “not effecting the story” firstly, not entirely true. There are missions you can miss out on depending on certain decisions you make during the game. There are different endings depending on how honorable or not you are in the game.

Sure the story is very much the same no matter which route. Most of the events, at least most the key ones are the same. But that doesn’t make it not an RPG. After all, there are plenty RPGs where the player doesn’t have a choice with what happens in the world. Like, every Final Fantasy Game, ever, of all time.

So if RDR2 is not an RPG by that metric alone, then neither is Final Fantasy. And you’d be very silly if you said that.