Darvon

I don't have any advice on how to fix it, but yes to everything OP said.

The 2D environments are great, the combat is beyond abysmal. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm enjoying the beta regret/10. Obviously the ship has sailed, but I'd cancel my order to get even a quarter of what I pledged back. I'm hoping I can offload an unopened collectors for like $40 after release.

Needless complexity seems to have been one of the design goals.

I second everything OP posted.

The combat is unresponsive and clumsy, and doesn't feel like it has any immediacy. The attacks, when they land, don't feel "chunky" (see, Doom2 supershotgun, Dark Souls Zweihander, Getting hit with an arrow in infinity engine, etc.). The combat animations in general are sluggish and weak. The combat math seems to have been made complex just for the sake of being complex. If I'm playing a single character maybe I'll spend the time to squeeze out every last modifier and point, when I'm dragging six characters around I want them to be basically point and shoot. The systems backend is making ad&d look simple and intuitive, think about that. Perhaps most damningly, it's just not fun. It's so far from fun that if I hadn't already backed I don't know I'd bother to check back later to see if massive changes brought it up to okay. The problems go way beyond what could be improved with number changes and bug fixes.

It's not a feature I'd use, so it would just be resources diverted from the parts I enjoy.