Having now cleared the miasma from the second town I may have finally settled into a decent control scheme. Keyboard/mouse was a complete failure it turns out, so I ended up going with Y -> Merge, B -> Hidden/Seraph Arte, A -> Arte, X -> Blast, L1 -> Target Change, and R1 -> Guard. I also figured out why the system wasn’t clicking: I was treating it like an action game where each button press immediately executes an action. That’s not how it works. Instead, each button press queues up an action. That’s an important distinction. If the game would only stop arbitrarily switching around my battle party for plot-required battles the combat system might actually become enjoyable.
Unrelated to combat, the storyline and cutscenes are still a bit of a problem. The former is almost painfully straight-forward (if a bit on the dark side) while the latter tend to be filled with these weird delays between character interactions that throw everything off. At least the characters themselves are still almost all enjoyable (the exception being that seraph that shoots himself in the head).
Exploration is still a lot of fun as well, and there’s even some more things to collect now (Normins). Hell, even the equipment fusing system has become more or less transparent with time and experience. Now if only the available types of equipment were clear upgrades instead of Stat upgrades combined with different base abilities. In a sane game Void Rings and Fire Rings (for example) would both give the same bonus to magic defense while having different inherent abilities… yet here the Fire Ring not only gives a higher defense bonus, but it gives a magic attack bonus as well. But you can’t just whimsically replace the Void Ring with the Fire Ring because one resists non-element attacks and the other resists fire attacks. It’s annoying.