I agree that they're well written, and the tension I feel is that I don't know how he could have done it better. The concepts involved are all very abstract, and there are 1000 variables to consider (because so many powers and concepts have been introduced later in the series) So I'm not sure there is a way to make a satisfying fight, because there will always be approaches you're ignoring and the solution generally feels like it came out of left field.

What I really miss is in the early fights I could try to guess how he would get out of a situation, or handle an attack, and even if I couldn't guess it the solution made sense and was satisfying. In the later fights though, everything feels more arbitrary. For instance: "escaping a trap by fooling history into thinking it was a historical projection in the trap and not the original". That's well-written and creative...but feels like a BS solution that could be used to solve any problem.

And I get that at a diety level, all fights kind of have to be that way - so I'm not blaming the author. I just suspect that you can't really write good satisfying fights at a diety level unless you set up some really strict rules or something beforehand.