You know what you need to be asking for? Story mod. Many games have now - it's when you want to just see the story and the combat is nominal, only to indicate that at this point you had to fight.
Rules tweaking only make people angry and in general is not productive. But story-mods is a great mechanic! It allows those who is not interested in combat still enjoy the game. It's opposite - super hard-mode - usually made for those who do not care for the story and tests itself in combat only. For them is enough to add full custom parties and an option to skip dialogues. And anything in between (preferably a few gradations) for everyone else.
So, yeah, seems like we just need difficulty system.
