Turn based combat is for board games. Action Points? My god, make a bad thing worse. But all you Einstein's that think a fight is,
Well, real-time combat doesn't make much of a fight either as long as you're sitting in front of a computer and clicking on pixels. Also, in a real fight you don't control multiple combatants whose sensory impressions and health are instantly known to you. So, I won't argue about "realism"™ in this matter. (And I won't call people names in a discussion, even if they belong to the greatest minds of humanity.)
For my part, I like both action-oriented games as well as tactical round-based games, but many of the latter are either too simple or too complex for my taste. DOS managed to be perfect in this matter for me, so I am overjoyed about this decision of the developers.
I don't think they have forgotten or "trashed" their former ideas, they just moved on as creative people do sometimes. I understand everyone who liked the old combat more to grief about its removal – I've been there many times in my ~35 years of computer gaming – but that's life and there are many alternaves in the gaming world.
