I think there's something a bit messed up here, because I seem to be finding encounters a lot easier after a while than at the beginning, and it's not because I'm playing more tactically. If anything I'm playing less tactically, and relying mostly on auto-attack; I also have bad weapons because of the item-disappearing bug, and yet enemies are going down so much faster that I'm wondering if some saving/loading bug is making my characters secretly more powerful. I know my main character's def, fort, ref, and will are all listed as over 4700, though that might be just a display bug, and the offensive stats look more sensible.
Same here. Playing on normal and the beatles were challenging but after that I beat every encounter (including spider queen and ogre) by "select all + lift click"