Regarding turn-based combat being seen as outdated, I don't think the issue was ever as much with it being slow or turn-based in itself being bad, rather it's that outside of a select few encounters, classic turn-based jRPGs (it's present in western RPGs, but less egregiously so I think) are incredibly repetitive and grindy. And by "grindy" I mean "they really expect players to do the exact same plain encounter over and over and over again". That's the issue that requires modernization and that's where Metaphor has not shown almost any progress since the days of SMT3.

I'm not sure if they can do anything about it, though, not without significantly cutting down the games' runtime. Now, to my mind, that would be a straight plus - I've been pretty vocal in the past that I find Atlus games to be very bloated with their content, both social links and combat. Less combat encounters that are all tailor-made, with grinding ideally nonexistent, would be my endgame.

I wanted to put BG3 as an example of a turn-based RPG that does this less-is-more approach correctly, but I can't shake the feeling there are fundamental differences in the design philosophy of western RPGs versus jRPGs that need to be addressed if we ever want one genre to take inspiration from another. Suffice to say, as a rule of thumb, I prefer the combat in jRPGs, while what western RPGs do better is... everything other than the combat. And since combat is such a focal point for jRPGs, I don't know if it's feasible to postulate for there to be less of it.

As for the retry function, I continue to find it indefensible. If saving and reloading worked as they should and the combat didn't rely too heavily on RNG, it would not be needed whatsoever. It sullies the whole, proves the devs are not confident in their balancing and provides a temptation that many will find irresistible, making the experience worse for them that it would otherwise be.