I think the reason Larian reduced the number of AP is because in DOS1 if you get the INITIATIVE you were able to kill/CC everyone in ONE TURN. Literally you pour points in SPEED and you got tons of AP and tons of init, add leadership 5 with something like +5/7 init and no enemy had a chance.
There is a Catch22 for TURN based combat. Where you have flexibility/balancing with high max AP because really powerful skills require more AP, but you can also do several low AP actions (in DOS1 you could get all the touch spells at 3AP and literally CC 3 or more enemies in one turn). Ideally you should NOT be able to do more than ONE action in each turn. That's the issue you get Init and can do 3+ actions before anyone else.
As a comparison PAUSE based combat like Baldur's Gate/Dragon Age doesn't have the problem of INIT being so powerful (or AP at all) because you give all your team commands at one time and the INIT/casting time/etc. is calculated in the background (its more like real time, unlike Turn based where everyone is frozen while each player takes their turn). It makes you think every round, do I cast this long 'casting time' powerful spell or do something else because if I get hit at all even for 1hp it will cancel my spell and I lose it.
I guess one way Larian can address the INIT issue is to remove Init as a stat and maybe at beginning of each turn randomly sort action rotation. This wouldn't really fix AP issue but maybe make it OK to use higher MAX AP.
To be honest I think the whole 'magic armor' system is related to this, because Larian is trying stop what you could do in DOS1 where your team gets high Init and high AP and can devastate the enemy in one turn. Now at least you have to break down the armor before you can devastate them. So fights are longer but not too bad.
Side note, I played DOS1EE with the Epic Encounter that has changes to HardCC by adding SoftCC and have to say in theory it is better but in reality it just makes each fight take MUCH longer. Other stuff not related to CC are cool though.
