I read and did everything on the keep. My custom tapestry has been set and been active since before I started my first game, I verified on the keep that the proper accounts were associated with my corresponding console accounts and the game did ask if I wanted to import my current world setting. I was painfully careful about this as I done this all previously on the 360 and was starting over on the PS4 becuse performance on the 360 was so poor.
Your comments about paying attention to the settings and picking up on all the hints are fallacious as you have no way to know what Varric is supposed to say or not say so short of being a developer you have no way of know these things. The backgrounds in the default world state for the characters in DA2 sync up with my playthrough.
All this would've been easilly avoided by simply having on the options>dragon age keep section to say that the custom world state was imported and or the name being used. Instead when you select in game it says to go to dragon age keep and set up a world state to sync. VERY poorly done. If you really think the way it set up and the needless complexity and total lack of being able to confirm if it has been imported or not until many HOURS of play time. Go back and read your own first paragraph and ask yourself if there was a better way than the endless sync, set active , press to import, confirmation being a small green check mark on an icon that is not very obvious and nothing even points you to it. By the way I did all this and it just didn't work. If you go look at the many articles on the intricasies of the keep you will find there are problem with some of the Origin accounts not syncing properly and the solution is to start over, share your world state and then reimport it. (no joke).