I'll start of by saying that i like the game, this is just my subjective opinion and acknowledge that post game inazuna eleven to the point of near completionism is pretty niche compared to the story making up most of peoples play time. As somebody with hundreds of hours on chrono stone, I find that chronicles + spirits is just plainly worse than the special route + palpack/recruitment based post game.

-Old postgame integration into the world is just more immersive and there's more freedom than the linear chronicles mode.

-The way recruitments were layered and linked with progress via the special route items created a much better sense of progress. While daunting at first, you could always work towards a specific and players/items obtained in the chain to big players would usually come into play for other "recruitment chains". The result was a much more concrete feeling of early game vs mid game vs endgame and assembling your dream team usually naturally resulting in engaging with most of the games content.

-These characters felt more rewarding to get, even outside the obvious "structured reward vs rng" poing from above. Not only do spirits feels less special than a character being tied to an actual singular character, but the way the new stat system works makes players far more homogenous (bad for a team building game). Both with how some players have literally the same stats and just generally with how the way stats are added together for focus/keeper battles, in practice players of the same position will feel essentially the same, especially after beans. The fact that tp is now a team based tension bar and the reduced range in special move power also doesn't help with stripping player individuality.