You have to be fair though - what you said would be true IF DD didn't feature so much combat. I've just recently started replaying it and even at the start, there's tons of combat in the catacombs beneath the village. It's not like DD was a story-driven RPG which is why your argument doesn't hold any water. DD may have been heavily inspired by Ultima VII but the latter was always more focussed on the story than the combat.
This is not to say the combat was BAD. It just wasn't as good as the rest of the game. For example: if you're a mage, you have to spam the meteor spell constantly because you're too weak to do hand-to-hand combat. It takes too long before you get a different spells - or other spells that really affect combat for that matter. This is why I said it was unbalanced in places.
