The whole post is very interesting, just two points :

As per the "builds", it was actually much better and simple in the first one. I find the new system to give too much freedom (weird I know), my mage knows a whole lot of spells from each schools and does not feel like a geomancer anymore.
The first one you had to spend point to be level 5 in something and have access to the more powerful ones. Here the source system and memory is just messed up. Honestly I must have used 5 source spell during the whole game. Source is not that easy to find, and I end up keeping it for a fight that will never happen, and doing the same combats over and over again.

The crafting is horrible. Here also the first one was way much better (and it was already not very good). There is the issue about the materials, but also there is a loooot of ingredient, you don't really know what you should keep, they removed a looot of recipes (amulets, belts...) which was bad. The only big thing is the crafting of skills sheet, and it's just too much.

To me the whole armor and less PA is not good in a sense where they should be spells only for applying effects, and spell more focused on damage output. I don't remember if it's the case, but in my memory the first one was a little like that where here all the spells/skills are the same, it's damage+effect, not really fun.

Yep, the more I play the more I feel uneasy with this game. I do have a 2/1/1 party with 2 physical, one magical, and one summoner which to me can be either magic or physical with the summons. It's not as bad as I thought, they did the armors in a sense where a mixed party is "not that bad" but there's always this moment at the end of the combat where there's only one man standing, half of the team is removing HP, the other half serves no purpose except trying to remove altogether the other remaining kind of armor.

I prefered the first one by far. All the system were pretty much better. I like RPG with clear roles, here the roles are not clear enough for my taste. My warrior does magic, my caster does physical... weird.