Rationalization is defending porting combat mechanics from a simplistic, single character crpg that's not even combat focused to a series of pre-designed scenarios which mostly aren't even all that interesting and calling it a tactical game, because apparently if you tried to make it more interesting it wouldn't work. Notice how you try to defend FT with JA2 comparisons, but JA2 actually has ways to quickly kill/get killed and careful management of wounds/recuperation etc?
As I said twice already, FOT has you killed with one rocket/missiles, or one heavy machine gun at short range until you get power armor. The level with super-mutant trenches can go very quickly very poorly as the SM are not easy to see in their trenched and can quickly stand up and shoot. Metal armor may allow you to survive a couple burst of heavy machine guns, and in RT you don't have the AP to heal between two shoots except if you use the (rare) super-stimpak. So there are those 1 shoot killed. And you can also get killed by normal rifles if you are not careful with what you are doing. And if you are careful with what you are doing, then you are playing it tactically ?
In JA2, most of the people you will lose will be when you have your team wounded (because as you said, wound management is well done) but you keep fighting instead of pulling out to fight the next day.
In addition, level design in FOT is sometimes total fail (first map for instance), sometimes really great (like that Beastmaster mission where you have some sorts of "mini-mission" like saving someone without detonating a bomb, etc).
The game is definitely on the easy side and on the simple-ruleset side, but if "being threatened" is your point of comparison I rarely feel threatened in JA2 either once I passed let's say 40% of the game - there is no "one-shot" kill in JA2, so most of the danger comes from those aliens and pumas, enemy mortars and of course dudes waiting you behind a door, especially underground. Yes, and once or twice in your playthrough an enemy will shoot at you with a LAW that you could not prepare for. Due to this, I would go as far as to say that the tactical challenges of JA2, once you have put your hands on good rifles, is pretty limited, all the more since enemies all look the same (either red or black, with the few exceptions like the hillbillies, and until they start shooting at you you don't know what weapon they have). I feel more threatened in Chaos Gate when I see an enemy with a multimelta or a enemy armor, and due to this I feel Chaos Gate offer more tactical challenges. More than this, I even think JA1 was tactically more difficult than JA2. It does not stop JA2 from being awesome.
Heck, thinking about it as I write this, I feel more threatened in FOT than in JA2 because you need to play it in real-time and in real-time shit can go wrong very, very fast and your snap decision to save your squad may make the situation even worse.
Because, yes, again, you have to play this game in real time. In turn-by-turn it has no interest whatsoever. I stated this in my first message in this thread and I actually mentioned that in turn by turn the resilience of your team (that can hide & heal once it is their turn) is too high :
I like it, but you have to play it as a real-time game or the missions are too long and stuff like units surviving grenades after bullets is ... weird. Turn by turn it is really terrible
Again, I am not saying it is a great game, but it deserves more credit than you give it and that I liked it.
Oh, so it's "be completely literal all the time otherwise I'll pretend I don't understand" now. Yeah, you can have soldiers carry 6 assault rifles with 2k ammo by mission 2, but ammo is not unlimited in FT, either.
There are few tactical games I actually ran out of ammo for "normal" weapons anyway. Even in XCOM it rarely happens. JA2 and even more JA1 are the exceptions.
Yes, let's put SS on the same shelf as FT, because they share a flaw.
Or rather, let's realize that flaws don't make a game necessarily terrible, and that you cannot take one flaw and then say "LOOK ! LOOK ! THIS IS THE PROOF THIS GAME IS SHIT !"
