I'm 20 hours in the game, soloing with a Paladin.
So true, I have limited options, and still few powers to choose from.

I'm a long time player of BGs... and other older RPGs and such. Avid player of PP RPGs too.
Jsut to clarify.

I have some gripes on the combat system:

* Recovery time seems to last an eternity. So long that, sometimes, I go to make a coffe while my character exchange blows with a shadow.

* Difference between a Fast and Slow weapon is barely noticeable.

* Deflection. I have 53 defelction, but seems useless. I've read around 100 start to be interesting.

* A HUGE amount of pauses. God. I can uncheck the options, sure.

* It seems some monsters deliver a minimum amount of damage, regardless of DR?
I think about the human-rats in the first temple.

* For a game that assign XP for quests and not monsters, there are too many monsters to fight, to the point of being boring. They stop me from progressing.
Only the first temple is taking ages to complete, just to wade trough uninteresting creatures (without rewards...)

1.) if your character is wearing heavy armor and wielding heavy 2h weapons, your recovery time is going to be long. this is a trade off of speed vs. damage+protection. Heavily armed and armored characters work best in a group. not good for soloing. Although if you want to solo a heavy, play a mage. they can wrap themselves in layers of defense.

2.) the differences between a fast and slow weapon might be imperceptible but it makes a difference.

3.) characters are pretty squishy at low levels. your defenses will bulk up over time. yes this makes the early game pretty dicey.

4.) pauses? it's a pause and play system. if you don't like it, play something else. besides, there are only as many pauses as you need. the slow function can slow down combat to give you more time to work the UI. come to think of it, have you checked to make sure the game isn't in slow mode?

5.) yes monsters do deliver a minimum amount of damage. in fact, loading screens advise the absolute bare minimum damage is always 1.

6.) you get monster expee for adding entries to the bestiary. it takes a certain number of kills to add an additional entry to a monster's bestiary section. when it's complete, you won't get any more exp for that monster. This eliminates the grind. If you like grind... maybe play nearly every other rpg in existence. Yes it severely caps your character's level but you'll level up on story progression primarily. You'll be plenty leveled as your adventure develops. Side quests help build experience. "Too many" monsters is subjective. You'll get less monsters in each fight on lower difficulties. The game doesn't exactly have an abundance of trash mobs.

When I first picked up Pillars and started playing, I had gripes as well, but it turned out to be an awesome game with a great and deep combat system, excellent combat pacing, etc. I now have 1000 hours into the game over the past couple of years. I'm also a fan of the same games you are.

Pillars came up with some pretty amazing answers to common issues that hurt combat balance, making it relatively hard to buff up pre-fight and ambush enemies, making potions of healing not game-breaking as they are in so many games, etc.

You can beat the same solo on the hardest difficulty without being overly creative, but then on the other hand, there are a few (optional) fights where a character who can beat the game otherwise will get blown out, and you need a whole different strategy based on a lot of knowledge of tiny nuances of the fight (including pulling some but not all enemies just right, using scrolls of confusion, mostly ignoring deflection and armor in favor of speed, etc), for people who like that sort of thing.

So far, I have finished the main game, now I am going through the White March. The combat is the least fun thing in this game to me. I agree that there are way too many random enemies in the game. If there were any less, some areas would feel empty, but since there is almost no exp for combat, they would at least give some reason for fighting the same enemies over and over. So, almost no exp, no useful items - seems like a waste of time to me. It would be great, if the combat system itself was fun, but it is OK at most.