The innate abilities don't quite have the strategic advantage one would think outside of making your character an easy target for bosses since they can dish out more hurt than normal enemies and their massive HP pools will easily allow them to shrug off whatever your character can do before the boss kills them, so it's actually more useful to the computer than you. Same with the area effect mechanic which is a neat concept, but too difficult to take real advantage of for the player. You're often better off just wasting magic spells to prevent the enemies from taking advantage cause when it comes down to it, your melee and skills are more useful than the actual elements are outside of healing and getting the true ending. I don't even want to go into how absolutely useless summons and time consuming summons are or how utterly underwhelming the Dual/triple techs systems in this game are.

CC's system kind of combines the worst aspects of VII's materia, FFTactics' Mages, and Xenogears combat systems together with pointless customization you'll never use because the whole system is designed to make magic as tedious as hell to use, especially when melee trumps everything. I load characters up with some low level healing and just crack heads with my party, and despite the large cast, only a few characters are actually worth using. Never really had much use for the mechanics and it honestly makes going through the game a chore for me.

P2 might have pointless melee, but I honestly feel like that's a good thing because too many RPGs go the other way so at least making fusion spells and Persona customization keeps you invested in all of the mechanics. Collecting cards isn't even all that tedious and I often enjoy chatting with demons. It's better than just endless grinding for the stuff.