Nobody likes tedious battle activities. The larger the party, the more risk of tedium and mundane repetition. That is perhaps the big advantage of real-time play, that the computer handles the blow-by-blow details quickly so that you can watch and enjoy the swooshing sounds and exploding bodies. In tabletop D&D, the combat process is tedious, but it is still fun because there is a lot of live interaction between the players sitting at the table. D&D is a social game, but in a single-player computer game, the social interaction is hard to simulate. That is why I advocate the increased use of NPC's who may fight with the player character, suggest courses of action, complain, etc., but who are not controlled by the player. The Narlen Darkwalk quest was my favorite out of the entire BG series thus far for precisely this reason, oh and uh, also the hilarious Cant dialogs, eh?
I think the OP has it right -- long battles are only boring if the battles are boring.
This applies to both RtwP and turn based game. In DOS2 the battle coming into Arx and the demon doctor fight took forever and both were fun. PoE1 wasn't a turn based game but the endless paths of trash mobs were tedium itself. Battle length wasn't an issue -- it was just that both the enemies and the ruleset were teh suck.
Oh and yes, I love the thieves cant -- would be great to see that in the game.
