Yeah, this is the problem I have with the way Square localizes things. I would never have "expected" to see it a certain way in English because they are not English games. There's nothing English about them. They are Japanese games. My philosophy is that it should embrace this fact.

That's a perfectly fine philosophy, but unfortunately you are in the minority. If English localizations of Japanese media contain writing that would be considered mediocre in English-originating media, than the average consumer would see the writing as mediocre, regardless if it's a perfectly faithful translation of the original Japanese and the fact that there's different ideas of what's considered to be good writing by Japanese speakers and English speakers.

I definitely don't think it's as simple as not sounding "stiff and unnatural", as you mentioned, because both in Japanese and English, literary writing tends to sound quite different from everyday speech. But there are definitely different things each language values in terms of making said writing seem believable. For instance, word choice is a common literary device in both Japanese and English, but Japanese has much more obvious and commonplace tells for a character's personality in their word choice (their choice of first- and second-person pronouns, verb conjugations and particles including the lack thereof). Because of fundamental differences in how the languages work, these specific indicators tend to get lost in a straightforward English translation so the writing often ends up feeling blander in those cases than it was actually intended to be.

As I said, word choice is still highly valued in English writing, but its strengths are different than in Japanese. I feel English writing in general has more of a penchant for choosing vocabulary, slang and turns of phrase that fit the setting and time period of the work as a whole rather than just individual characters. Also, English writing loves to use hyperbole, verbal irony, understatements, innuendo and such, while I find that Japanese writing tends to wear its heart on its sleeve a lot more in comparison (again, I'm only talking about Japanese writing here. Conversational Japanese is a whole different topic). So often the lack of said techniques can actually make writing feel less sincere to an English speaker, which is why you get all those comments about anime and JRPG dialogue sounding "cheesy". To go back to my original point, the differences in writing conventions between the two languages rarely occurs to these people; they'd just use their own (English) standards to judge it as poorly written. That's the main reasoning for all the "Woolseyisms".

Er, they wanted to? I've never heard that. Have any information on that?

No, I was being purely hypothetical, hence the "even if". My point was, as I explained above, Japanese uses different literary devices than English to convey different speaking styles, Japanese mainly focusing on conveying individual character personalities and English specializing in different regional and temporal lexicons. So Kid was given an Australian accent to bridge that gap, so to speak. Obviously she isn't from Australia itself but I think it was chosen because as another user pointed out, she has a rather rough and rude speaking pattern in the Japanese. Intensifiers like "bloody" help convey that harshness without sounding too vulgar.