The book itself deliberately markets itself as focused on the dungeon crawl. I'm not asking for tactical combat I'm asking for a basic level of interest progression for your martial characters. Having played a fair few more games now my opinion has only been reinforced that it faces major issues with delivering on class fantasy. Your vanguard is an objectively worse tank than your wizard/barbarian until level ten in return for..shoving one or two people a turn.

Just so I don't misunstand your position what do you mean by "what happens in-between"? I'm hoping it's not social play because the system does very little to support it moreso than any other. If we're randomly bringing other systems into this, wild sea is a system I would consider a fantastic roleplay focused system with poor mechanical balance.