You missed the mark by thinking I'm only talking about the auto-selection of abilities. I am yet to have made assumptions about how you play your game, just by the way. Regardless, you're swinging and missing here. The combat, even auto-stacking in FF13 wasn't one of the things i really disliked about that game.
The very limited AI options means you're often just painting with very broad strokes, hoping the AI will make the decisions you want.
I haven't talked much about strategy and tactics of the "old" (not really *that* old, i'm including games up to the third most recent single player games, after all) games. I've been talking about progression systems that give you options, and that offer at least a little bit of depth to dig into.
Maybe i'm just weird, but I always prefer to overcome difficult enemies by exhausting the options given to me in character progression systems, figuring out good combinations and skills that give good synergy, rather than just brute forcing my way with 10 extra levels. Leveling up in an RPG is basically just gradually adjusting the game's difficulty, and keeping them at or below what the developers intend you to be at makes the game harder, assuming you can make up for the power deficiency with smarter playstyles that require more planning and better strategies.
The (advanced) sphere grid allowed me to customize my characters with lots of variety, with a path that usually easy to see as the intended one, but nothing stopped you from going somewhere else on it. Planning your route, asserting the advantages and disadvantages of going in a specific direction, and how this build would fit with the builds made on the other characters, that's what I think is fun. Likewise for the materia and junction systems. Figuring out the quirks of new, reasonably complex systems is one of my favourite parts of RPGs, and it's one of the few things that almost every final fantasy made in the last 20 years have had. If I understand every part of the character progression system within 1 hour of playing (like in 13), then something's gone wrong.
Thankfully, there are other games that offer this if SE decides to drop the ball permanently.
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