No, there's a good bit of that in fact. I mean you need the Knowledge and Lore to know what weaknesses to target. Playing Trickster takes it to the extreme.
I mean that sentence in "these non-combat scripted events are affecting the next combat encounter quite significantly", not in "use Lore skills to get enemy weaknesses when you inspect them" sense. A good parallel would be: finding and poisoning Srag Lord's wine, passing Lore checks in Outpost to set up the tar and traps vs the Bandit. In a lot of other cases passing non-combat skill checks before encouter usually means skipping it all-together or reducing enemy number (e.g. passing a lot of Diplomacy checks in both games).
The action economy always matters for the player. That's how they get away with all those ridonkulous abilities and gear - in most cases you can only use one at a time so the challenge is what to use when. If you fight the (quasi-)optional stuff on level it's plenty challenging.
yeah, but I mean this one in the sense that due to the fact that the Dragon has terrifying presence + will start with unleashing breath weapon on your arse, that battle was few if not only one where the first few turns are critical on the player part to manage movement and use abilities as neccesary. If you bring Daeran this is one of the few scenarios where his Oracle weaknes is "this is annoying but we can work with this" to "oh shit Daeran is staggered in the first round" (the other usually involves Gargoyle or something spawned on your backline at start of battle).
In most other encounters you will nearly always start pre-buffed so its just a matter of being efficient, doing so is not critical to actually win/surviving the encounter. I do agree that lot of the optional fights have action economy matter even with pre-buff tho. The one I remember the most is the big Demon thing in basement/old section of Arelu labs.
I really doubt they will get the game in time in June now lol. I think they are working on a new Chapter at a pace of 3 months/chapter. The game is suspposed to be at least 6 chapters (1 chaapter per 1 AP book, there are 6 AP books). That put June as the barest minimum they will be finishing these chapters on not counting bug fixing etc. Not to mention that Chapter 5 and 6 are supposed to be when the majority of diverging stuff from Mythic Path start to come into play.
Hyped to play. Kingmaker (asides from the last dungeon) is a 9/10 , best crpg i played. Sorry Josh Balanceman Sawyer..But Deadfire doesn't come even close 
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