It’s all the aesthetics, honestly. CTB has all the aesthetics of strategic gameplay without actually giving you in-depth strategic turn-based gameplay we now know is possible through stuff like Megaten. X-2’s iteration of ATB is all about the aesthetics of fluidity, later evolving into XIII’s ATB, but ATB is a hybrid system that’s meant to be a blend of the speed of real time and the depth of turn-based battles, and those two elements just skew it way more heavily towards action - meanwhile, XII’s ADB feels way more like a natural successor to that, but it’s also less flashy. So yeah, aesthetics