Given what she's been through, it's a wonder she can do anything at all. I know people IRL who have been through less than that in Bosnian war, but it left them broken shells, too caught up in the past to do anything in the present. She is first and foremost a PTSD sufferer, her gender is incidental. And if you switched her and Minsc around, ie if she was a mentally challenged brute incapable of functioning in society without a handler, and he was a big bundle of insecurity and self-pity, would it still be sexist? IMO both personalities are about equally weak, just in different ways. What would you really want, stories that don't have any characters with such deep flaws? Because IMO that wouldn't make for very engaging stories.
The problem is not that she is "flawed" or "broken", like I said, all the other female (and the male as well for that matter) characters are flawed and broken in some or several ways, and I have no issue with them. The problem us that she is Weak, a Damsel. That
is her character and character arc. She is a platitude and a great example of the Broken Bird who can't survive on her own, a frail little girl who needs a Man to come and save her, somebody so pure that having sex with her before
marriage True Love ruins her forever. Oh and how do we know it's True Love when they finally get to make love without breaking her? Because she gets pregnant, of course. She's literally a cavalcade of one sexist cliche after another. She isn't isn't a deep character, she's a ridiculous wish fulfillment fantasy for boys who want to be Knights In Shining Armour. Even Korgan has a deeper characterization than her.
And no, you can't turn it around and have Minsc act that way instead. That's the thing with sexist tropes, they are not equal between genders. That's what makes them sexist. A Big Fighter Dude like Minsc taking Aerie's place would be interesting and refreshing, because you very rarely see men in that position, let alone Big Fighter Dudes. He would still be a flat character and have no character development, but then again, he didn't have any in the OC anyway.
Also, about Aerie not having a sidequest? She did have one planned, but it was scrapped for one reason or another, like so many other things with BG. It dealt with her wing issues, of course. And you know what the Good ending was? Not helping her overcome (or hell, even helping her start to deal with) said issues. Not finding a easy to magically grow her wings back. The "Good" ending was turning her into a bird. Permanently. Yay great ending resolves nothing!
IDK, we got a computer when I was 12 in the mid 1980's, i have 2 sisters and am the only boy in the family, other than my dad. I got obsessed with programming straight away with no encouragement from anyone else, but both my sisters never showed any interest in getting into it. All of us got exactly the same schooling, same classes. Exactly how did "community barriers" play into this effect? Home computers were pretty much the latest thing, and not everyone had them yet, so there was no widespread preexisting social expectation that "computers were for boys". and my sisters certainly played enough of the same games that i did, and were never discouraged from using the computer, they just never cared about "looking under the hood".
Yeah, but i'm talking at the dawn of home computing, amongst kids who had NO IDEA about the industry, didn't really know any other families with computers, before we even had internet or media protrayals of "hackers", and "geeks" on TV. How are kids who's only exposure and knowledge to programming is the book on programming which came with their new computer automatically dividing with 90% accuracy into boys who become computer obsessed, and girls who DGAF. We're talking little kids here who didn't know the first thing about programming courses being male-dominated.
Your "positive feedback loop" can't explain that. Little kids have NO IDEA about what's happening in any industry or college course. And this was pretty much universal over a decade before the web became a household reality.
The social expectations does not just affect programming in itself, but extends to all technical, engineeringal and mechanical things. "Looking under the hood", as you so aptly described it, is in itself viewed as something boys and not girls should do, whether it comes to computers or cars.