I actually loved the Drawing mechanic, it was just such a cool idea. It can get tedious but that's if you actually bothered to use it to get 100 of the spell as soon as it was available. Refining is what I had bigger issues with since I felt it borked the games difficulty.

I can agree that the enemies leveling with you mechanic didn't work as it should have. Part of that issue is once again how a clever player can abuse it to bork the game again but even without doing that, with a real good Junction set-up that even the auto-junction feature can set up for you, the only thing a Lv100 enemy has going for it is lots of HP, they still have issues injuring you. Malboro is probably the only exception... The other issue here is that high levels also gets you access to better magic and thus better Junctions, so it kind of defeats itself.

The armor thing does kind of bother me, I am an equipment junky who doesn't like messing with this sacred old RPG tradition, even games like FFX and XIII fail for me cause the equipment system is not as important as I would like it to be for customization purposes. Still, this was kind of a new idea back in 99, so I tend to be a bit more forgiving to VIII.

Ultimately my two main beefs with VIII has always been how easy it is to break the games. I mean VI, VII, and IX are pretty bad, but VIII can be borked in the first half an hour of actual gameplay if you know what you are doing. My other beef has always been with the plot and the way the characters were used that really failed to live up to the potential it had going for it, while it's certainly not the worse writing in the franchise *cough*FFXIII*cough*, in fact it's the only entry in the series exclusively written by Kazuhige Nojima that I can actually stand.