I don't think that Sawyer's approach is necessarily bad, but he's not really communicating well how he envisions it to work. How much impact does correct preparation have? If party composition, spell choice and all that stuff is basically just a matter of aesthetics or preference, and the game is about "playing your build well" or whatever, that sounds kind of terrible, since it arguably makes it harder to produce interesting encounters that would encourage or force the player to switch strategies. Doing the things that your character or party are good at over and over again is banal; having to come up with new ways to overcome their limitations is interesting. This is why going out of your way to avoid roadblocking players is a double-edged sword; it's not a bad idea in absolute terms, but involves dangerous tradeoffs.
I've been replaying Vagrant Story recently, and one of the great things about it is how a lot of fights have one or more "elegant" solutions - by and large by using the correct type of weapon and the right buffs, debuffs and defensive tools - which, when correctly applied, make most fights quick and makes you feel awesome. A lot of these solutions involve a type of "hard counter", in that you can defuse some critical part of the enemy's arsenal or bypass some part of their defense effortlessly. But even if you don't have the tools to apply an ideal solution like that, you can generally still brute-force your way through in any number of ways, it's just usually riskier and a lot less efficient. The thing, though, is that in all of these cases encounters differ from one another, which makes switching strategies, equipment, skills and spells worthwhile; you could say there's always a fairly granular range from the perfect strategy to feasible strategies to strategies that are just plain terrible and will take you nowhere.
The thing about Vagrant Story, if anything, is that the game doesn't feel like it's explicitly designed to be beatable with any kind of strategy or build. It's just that the game's combat mechanics are so robust and have enough moving parts that you can always come up with some desperate last-ditch way to use the tools at your disposal to overcome difficult enemies, though with varying degrees of success, as this can turn battles into slow, grueling battles of attrition. With any luck, this may be the kind of thing Sawyer is going for, but I think he may be worrying too much about making any approach, build or tool set feasible in any situation. I'd rather he give the player a reasonably broad set of tools and let them figure out how to overcome challenges with it. In some ways it's a tiny, almost a semantic difference, but one that has a big impact on how people approach the game.
