I think the OP has formed a lousy argument, but I certainly agree with him that parts of this combat feel incredibly janky and unwieldy. In big battles, it's sometimes hard to tell what's going on, for example, especially since the combat dialogue box is undercooked (no party member color coding?!). Plus the range on spells and general design of AoE make positioning your spellcasters a pain in the butt even if you have enough fighters to get some sort of melee wall going (and you won't during the start of the game unless your PC was a fighter to complement Eder).
They also failed to nail the encounter curve, IMO, which is why I think a lot of people are having problems with this game who would otherwise be cruising and loving their time with it. When you first meet Nonton in Valewood, he says something to the effect of "you should just skip this one, pal." But of course, lots of games of this type (most recently Wastleland 2) say stuff exactly like that as flavor, and the player is intended to be able to surmount those obstacles. Not here. The game does a so so job of distinguishing between that kind of RP flavor and real fourth wall breaking gameplay advice to the player. Ditto the first bounties you get, which are described as "tough" or whatever, but make the Raedric keep look easy by comparison and are not intended to be tackled when they first become available.