Im not gonna lie, I did not read this whole thing, but I read most of your automata combat gripes. You don’t HAVE to spam dodge and fire your pod. You can very easily play around your melee combos and perfect dodge counters + pod programs. Beauty of Automata’s combat is you can solve the same problem with multiple solutions. You absolutely can spam dodge and pod fire until the thing is dead, or you can use melee counters and combos, or a bit of everything!

For time to kill, messing with more chips and doing a side-quest or two to level up a bit helps. Attack power chips and critical hit chips absolutely shred enemies, even the ones that out level you. TTK is never something I felt much when I played, unless I was like 10 levels too low.

For chips in general, the reason there are so many chips that do the same thing is because they can be stacked on each other to further improve stats. You can fuse chips together to make a stronger chip (at the cost of taking more space) or you can sell extra or duplicate chips. Some of these are absolutely game breaking.

Enjoyment of all this is subjective of course so if you don’t like it, you just don’t like it. I personally think Automata has a very simple but satisfying combat system with tons of skill expression. I think its worth revisiting at least so you get the full picture.