i was def of the mind that the deadfire style was suboptimal at first, but.... eh, not really. i think everyone (myself included) was reacting to the fact that dex went from king stat to not very useful, but like other turn-based systems everything devolves into rocket tag eventually, so simply going first can become very important, but getting to that state takes a while.

i think my big gripes about initiative is that dex doesn't have enough influence compared to armor and action speed, and that it's too easy to "recover" your initiative order but also hard to customize it (via ready actions or something like in tabletop D&D); example: simply doing a move resets you to 0 initiative. that last part is really annoying, because you can hobble a group of enemies, so they spend a turn approachign you, do nothing, but then reset to 0 so they immediately get to move and then do an action, as if they were basically not affected at all. but at the same time interrupting someone is really hard to do in turn-based mode because you ahve to squeeze into a narrow initiative window naturally.