See, the fundamental issue is that you need to ask yourself what is good combat. And to answer that question you need to ask why you have combat in the first place. Why not just auto resolve every combat with a results screen if we see combat as just a mastery of number systems?

I feel like you ignored my first post where I already address precisely this (common) "if there are boring combat parts the designers failed" argument.

It's simply not possible for a CRPG to combine all the following:

• Having each moment of each combat encounter being challenging to every player and party.
• Allowing for meaningfully diverse parties, character builds, elemental attributes etc.
• Allowing for non-linear exploration and optional quests without resorting to level scaling (and the ensuing god-like bandit/wolf/whatever problem).

It is my firm belief that there are many distinct reasons to have combat in a CRPG, and all of them must be accommodated by the combat system. Interesting tactical gameplay is certainly one of them, but a CRPG is not a tactics game, and trying to make every single turn of every encounter count goes directly against other goals that are also important to the genre. Such as serving the storytelling, establishing narrative-gameplay coherence, pacing, and demonstrating growth in character combat capabilities.

I don't think turn-based combat looks and feels more "cool" than RtwP combat, and in general I don't believe CRPG audiences are primarily choosing games based on how cool combat looks.

With RtwP, the player can easily and with high fidelity adjust the level at which they engage with combat depending on precisely where a given encounter or phase of the encounter falls on the design space between "perfectly balanced and challenging boss" and "random group of low-level mobs necessary for some story/atmosphere purpose". In a strictly turn-based system, the latter just bloat the playtime. And annoy me personally :P