Oh, I totally agree.
Like PoE2 has shown, turn-based does make combat more fun, but if you don't also improve the encounter design, all it does is drag out trash encounters...
The point is that TB makes encounters take more time.
Which means a game can have less encounters and still be long.
Which means more development time can be spent on each encounter, making it as good as possible.
Meanwhile in RTwP, encounters are often over in seconds (or less than five minutes if you do a lot of pausing) - that's just not worth the development time investment to make them all challenging and interesting.
As such, only some encounters in RTwP games can have that level of attention (usually boss fights).
Additionally, RTwP is harder to play than TB, which in turn means the encounters have to be easier for people to be able to play through the game. Not the best players, mind you, but the majority of players.
I agree that neither is a guarantee of a good experience.
But RTwP is pretty much a guarantee for mostly trash encounters, and in the best cases a few good ones.
And Larian has shown that it can make memorable encounters that will end up being close calls in many cases in TB games.
Why ignore that skillset and go RTwP instead where they cannot spend as much time on each encounter?
Because the series so far was RTwP? That's just not a convincing argument to me.
Now, if they did both, and make it switchable while playing (like Arcanum), I think we could end up with a very good result. Trash encounters could be resolved in RTwP, while the tougher nuts to crack could be resolved in TB. And Larian would be free to design more tough encounters as they don't need to make the encounters easy enough for everyone to breeze through in RTwP.
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