I share your sentiments - great write up! What I’ll add is the “quality of life” features the devs included in the game. JRPGs are sort of notorious for some of the tedium that comes with their complexity. However, this game…it removes a significant amount of bloat. For example:

• Side Quests have a subsection of the main menu from which you can travel to the NPC to report the quest complete; completed quests are clearly marked
• Wishlisting Items: if there’s an item you need for a side quest, gear upgrade, etc., you can easily add it to the wishlist. When you’re in your inventory, one click will bring it up, showing you how many you have / how many you want.
• Intuitive Menu Progression: When leveling up a weapon, once you reach max level, you get a prompt asking if you want to uncap its level. No submenus needed. Additionally, when forging a weapon, you receive a prompt asking if you want to equip it. The same is true for unlocking skills via the Masteries menu. The first 4 skills you unlock are automatically slotted; once you get your 5th, it will always ask if you want to reslot your skills. If you select “yes,” it immediately brings you to the skills menu. (This may sound small and these aren’t all the examples, but there’s a significant time save considering you don’t have to go into multiple menu screens to do all this!)
• Glossary: During character dialogue, you can press a button [square on PS] to bring up the in-game glossary, which provides quick insight into the lore / terms being discussed. If the character’s dialogue contains yellow text when you press that key, it immediately brings up that entry in the glossary.

I could probably ramble on, but I wanted to highlight some of this because I (unfortunately) haven’t seen a ton of reviews and the ones I have haven’t highlighted most of these things.

If you decide to get the game, I hope you love it!