This really puts in to words many of the reasons i kinda fell out of interest with the game. It started off interesting to me at first but, man it just became a mindless drudge and i couldn't really stand it.

The one thing i'll say about the combat is that, for the most part, i found the non-turn based battle in an RPG to have been done much better by Square's earlier Kingdom Hearts games. The ease of combat and basically the fact that i can button mash and evade to victory, really didn't make me feel i needed a lot of the features it had in there. Like the whole Elemancy (i had to look up the name of it, that's how unmemorable it was)

IMO, while you do make a solid point that the battle system is it's biggest flaw. The game suffers from a whole lot of issues that, compounded, make things worse than it is.

There's Lack of charachter and story development which would have made the game far more interesting from a story perspective, As it was it was rather bland and rushed IMO (much like the battle)

A lot of that development was supposed to be at least added later between stories, mobile games, updates, and DLCs - because someone thought "yeah people will buy this to get the whole story" - even if that did work, they would have had to made all the Games\DLCs\Movies a lot better than they did.

There's a lot of effort in XV, in terms of design, art, etc., But all the money and efforts went to places where it eventually didn't matter.