Regarding the tediousness and boredom potential mid to late game: I've experienced some of that, but I think a big part of that has to do with animation speeds. At this point in the campaign, we've learned the mechanics and generally what is happening... but to watch 2-3+ archers fire 2-3 shots each with that unforgivably slow animation really starts to take its toll.
But if the game would be balanced in the mid to late game such fights would be still challenging and i think that this is the reason why some people are complaining about the game balance.
I tend to understand things and problem solve in very obscure ways. Perhaps I'm wrong in saying its a "big part", but I definitely think it plays into things.
I think developing a perfect difficulty level has its own very difficult setting, so why not put difficulty in the player's hands through self imposed party compositions? If combat animations are sped up, players will make it through the campaign (with their successful party) quicker. This allows them to build a new party composition and try again... a party composition that might not react to mid-late game encounters with such ease, which effectively increases the difficulty level.
I'm not a programmer, so this might not be the case, but I expect that combat animation settings are somewhat centrally located in terms of code. From a development standpoint, adjusting those settings leads to what I mentioned above with minimal time invested, whereas adjusting 2/3rds of the game's total encounters is much more time intensive, since I expect that would require adjusting each individual encounter. Reducing combat animations to allow more runthroughs is a more efficient way to allow for a more challenging game, or at least a higher probability of it.
