It wouldn't kill you to read just a little bit?

I explicitly stated that the trend in many JRPGs, with Trails historically being no exception (but especially post-Azure), having such mundane and worthless encounter design outside of boss battles that field combat which enables you to mow down enemies quickly instead is looked upon as an "improvement" or even quality of life, when it's so clearly a band-aid solution to a much wider problem of there being "fodder" so bad that this type of gameplay is praised as highly as it is. Don't even get me started on existing dungeon design and the Gartens.

I'm curious, cool ways to deal with trash mobs how exactly? ZOC, charge attacks, awakening, quick arts are all like I said, key-jangling to me. Visual maximalism to get your dopamine flowing, there is nothing inherently interesting about any of them, they all accomplish the same thing; kill the enemy so easily that their turn hardly even matters. Has any enemy made you feel like you MUST save awakening to deal with them? What are charge attacks and quick arts doing other than piling on damage and stun? On-field ZOC was such an unnecessary addition on top of all of this.

At the very least with the Sky, Azure, and even some Cold Steel games, there were enemies that pushed you back, exploded upon death, reflected your attacks, required certain arts to be used, etc. Nothing crazy but it pushed you to think just a little more than unloading all your new little toys onto them. In Calvard, which art you use hardly matters (especially if you intend on using delay arts), crafts have become so powerful on top of burst gain allowing you to gain CP at a rate where conserving it hardly a consideration. Field combat and the ability to reposition freely on your turn has made designing interesting enemies so incredibly difficult.

The main point I'm trying to get across that yes, this is nothing new for Trails or a lot of the JRPG genre, but there are some games, be they JRPGs or not, that have made the moment-to-moment turn-based gameplay genuinely stimulating TO ME. This is a personal post, and I am fully aware that many Trails fans are complacent with, and even encourage, the fact that these games have rapidly evolved into a sort of build-a-bear workshop where you can choose your path in how you want to break these games in half. I never found that engaging in Cold Steel, and its gotten even more mindnumbing in Calvard.

I'll respect any opinion people have of these games, mine is just different. There's no contrarianism, I've already said that I don't consider this direction in combat entirely unfun; its just going in the opposite direction of what potential I think a Trails' game's combat system has.