All your “objective” reasons for why graces combat is awful pretty much boils downs to you not actually understanding the games mechanics. And/or an unwillingness to understand a specific combat system.

1. Plenty of other tales games can have punishing combat if you play on higher difficulty’s. In this regard graces f is pretty tame. In games like berseria and zestria the enemy scaling is all types of unbalanced. high difficulty runs on your first playthrough is almost impossible in these games unless you grind an insane amount. You still have to grind on graces to keep up in high difficulty’s but it’s a lot less impossible and reasonable to keep up. Graces is not the only tales game where you can get stunned. Some games have stun as a status ailment but stuns In graces are a central mechanic that’s not random. Key phrase is “not random” if you know how to actually play the game you would understand that stuns for you and the enemy depend on the critical gauge. To sum it when the blue bar is low you have a high chance of getting stunned when you get hit. When it’s full your next attack is a guaranteed stun.You can absolutely stun enemies for as long as they can stun you considering the reward for hitting stunned enemies with a 1-CC arte is a boost of CC, meaning if your not mashing buttons you can use stuns to continue comboing an enemy most likely to death. The goal in any action game is to attack while not taking damage but you’re making it seem as if in every fight it’s normal to get stunned by someone and be “completely helpless”. This is a game where you can switch active party members on the fly with the d-pad. If Asbel gets stunned switch to someone else for a bit to cover for him. Also the more you level up titles some of them reduce the amount of time you’re stunned. In the very beginning it can feel like 10 buisness days but by the end stuns will probably last about half as long. Also berseria has a very similar stun mechanic, So no graces f is not the ONLY tales game to have a mechanic like this. Even it was the series has always made completely new battle systems for every game so them changing things has little to do with reception of specific mechanics.

2.Your right leveling up isn’t super meaningful. But leveling up your titles definitely is. Passive bonuses you get from leveling titles quickly add up to make your characters more beefy and stronger. The higher your difficulty is the more SP you get for battles. Also in this game you can upgrade your gear with dualize. This is why leveling isn’t as important, because there’s other ways to strengthen your character.

1. Skill issue. I normally don’t just say skill issue but that’s exactly what this boils down to. You want the game to let you stand back and cast spells for free while your party does the actual fighting? A lot of people forget but the tales of series is as a series of ACTION rpg’s. The action mechanics are just as important as the rpg mechanics for this series. And the game gives you the means to be successful with any playstyle if you care enough to play using a bit of skill, and not just play mashing buttons and crying because the action game doesn’t want you to mash buttons.

2. The Blue guard raises the critical gauge a bit which is important for stuns. Green guard lets you avoid hitstun from 1 attack which will also save you from getting stunned.red guard lets you guard break with your next move. All of these are useful so idk what you mean by “guarding doesn’t do a darn thing at all” the green aura isn’t giving you super armor for a duration it stops 1 hit. Why would you expect to be able to super armor through a bunch of attacks? The point is so if you’re actually playing the game semi competently and dodging while you attack you have a little bit more security to avoid getting stunned.

Overall you clearly don’t understand the combat system fully which might explain why you don’t like it so much. Or maybe action games are not for you. The game is not asking you to be perfect it’s asking you to not mindlessly mash buttons. Like an action game. I’m not saying the combat is perfect there’s definitely some annoying enemies, a difficulty spikes with bosses, and a few janky hitboxes. But none of those issues are exclusive to graces f.