And yet it was doable. People just opted not to do it.
Of cource it was doable. Your point is? The spells weren't balanced for you to use them in every fight, and that was clear in most people minds.(people with functioning minds at least).
Yes, it was very easy to sidestep the restriction, abuse the system. So what? If someone didn't make the correlation between :game too easy->spamming 3 dragon's breath in every encounter, chances are he was to dumb to win otherwise and should be thankfull that the BG2 devs allowed for an ingame easy/cheat mode.
So it was the devs giving a freebie to less-autistic players and not them using what was an easily exploitable system that was easily exploited?
Holy ****, take off your nostalgia goggles. This is absurd.