Scripted fights are boring for a 2nd time, but there are much bigger problems with difficulty and replayability.
The biggest one being Larian's stubborn reluctance to make the D&D ruleset work properly, i.e. the "op is fun" philosophy. Crazy Illithid powers, magic items, abundant exploits and of course, unlimited Long Rest. They destroy D&D's resource management and bounded accuracy concepts with reckless abandon. Combat becomes a dumbed down smash fest where damage is insanely high, reviving downed characters is trivial and a Long Rest is available anytime you want full powers back.
What the game needs is a Core Rules difficulty mode that imposes restrictions of the 5e system in a meaningful way. Embrace how the system the game uses is designed, not break parts of it. BG3 uses 5e, but the devs didn't really want to because they wanted a flashy frag fest over a smart tactical experience. That shows. And because of this shift in play style and how much damage martial classes inflict, high level magic like Chain Lightning now feels weak and underwhelming.
Conversely, increasing enemy stats and HP is not a real new difficulty mode. It just means you now have to use the most OP builds and resort to Illithid powers. The game would still essentially play the same. So a difficulty mode like that actually limits your options instead of adding anything meaningful. D&D-like restrictions would be better for challenge and changing how the game plays, but I'm sure Larian disagree. Then again, objectively, if you already have 3 difficulty modes that just fiddle with stats and modifiers, why wouldn't you want to add a difficulty mode that does something more profound and actually changes how the game plays?
The amount of companions is a huge hindrance to replayability. I'm sick of them after just one almost finished playthrough. Well, not sick but replaying their stories is not appealing and using the same characters in combat is not a fresh take tactically. Adding just a few more companions would have created a massive increase of different party compositions. And no, respeccing Shadowheart into an Open Hand Monk doesn't help, it's just stupid.
All that said, the game also desperately needs random elements. Random encounters and randomness inside encounters. Random events. The world needs to feel real and unpredictable rather than a movie where you get to choose path A or B.
Couldn't have said it better myself!
Although, there are some gimmicky ways to wipe the floor with high lvl spells, but but but! Martial classes can just keep on going, meanwhile sorcs/wizards/spell oriented druids can only use their high lvl spells so often, then they need to long rest/use up their resources to refresh spell slots.
Another thing is, it's easy to beat pretty much everything without using any tadpole powers on tactician too, without ever consuming any tadpoles and just the early game is a little bit harder, but once you start snowballing (all thanks to OP items and somewhat questionable multiclass options) you just don't stop. And yep, the illithid powers entirely break the game. It's just so damn silly.
What annoys me the most about the way tactician is implemented currently, is that enemies don't exert any extra or smarter behaviors. They will try to rush squishies first and that's about it (and it's easy to abuse that behavior to funnel them through some nasty surface spells like cloudkill). I just wish enemies had access to the same spells AND abilities as player characters, but nooo. Nearly 2 full runs on tactician (roleplaying runs too btw) and I have never seen an enemy cast any lvl 6 spell, or 5, or 4. I only once saw a fireball. 99% of the time it's just counterspell.
Edit: What I miss the most in BG3, in comparison to the originals is day/night cycle. Especially the different behaviors of NPCS and different enemy types bound to the time of day. But as BG3 is structured currently, I don't think we'll ever get day/night cycle.
