"...I must admit I'm slightly perplexed by the fixation with combat in an RPG..."
years ago my gaming group was not happy with any of the RPG systems so eventually we just ditched them all. We just described our characters to the DM at the beginning and we handled combat the same way we handled everything else, we told the DM what we are trying to do and he figured out what happens re: the world and NPCs. It worked pretty well.
EDIT: That said, CRPGs are a little different (with the exception of games that allow a DM) in that we can only do the pathways programmed in. We don't have the option to really RP so the game focuses on the mechanics.
Same experiences with me. In all my D&D TT games back in the day every DM I played with and myself as well when I DM'd, we always used house rules to get around what we considered to be tedious and unrealistic combat. But more importantly, in virtually every game, combat was very decidedly secondary to the non-combat parts of the game. We'd even go several weeks worth of playing without a single combat encounter, with intrigue and political machinations and puzzles and the like being what the game was all about. As such it was your choice of all the non-combat skills and abilities and feats as well as your non-combat equipment and consumables that really mattered. We even enforced characters' "knowledge" skills, known languages, and ability to read and write.
These are the things I hope BG3 will have a whole heck of a lot of, and if so then even if I don't like their combat system as I expect I won't, well, no big deal.
