I think the skyrocketing costs of development from last gen and onward also hurt the market, because now devs needed millons of sales to justify games for a niche genre. In the PS2 days, it was a lot easier to put something out and be satisfied with a few hundred thousand copies sold. Nowadays, anything less than 3 million is an automatic failure. It's not that cut and dry, of course, but you get the idea.

XBC feels like what SoM would be if it existed today. I didn't enjoy SoM due to all of it's flaws, but I've always wanted to play some of the sequels to see how well they've improved upon it.

You got a spare Sega CD lying around? :)

I prefer turn based with Grandia being the gold standard, but the Tales series has won me over that having action elements can be fun and strategic as well.

Super Mario RPG was a turn based game, but it also had some action elements.  You selected all of your actions from the menus, taking all the time you wanted.  Then, when your character is actually performing the action on screen, you could press the 'A' button at the right time to do extra damage.  Or when defending, to take less damage.  The sound effect would change if you got it right.

What you are refering to, I think just depends on the speed of your characters and the speed of the enemies.

I didn't notice this one before, but you like Dark Wizard?  Dark Wizard is awesome.  If you haven't played it, check out Brigandine.  It's a spiritual successor to Dark Wizard.  Here's the review I've made of it and here's a playthrough of it.

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=176224

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ-NHkMnJ7I&list=PL62T1V2W4FvU1HiSp-DufSWk3qx-z7N04

Everyone who hasn't played Brigandine should read the review and check out the gameplay.  Such an amazing game.  It's so enjoyyable that you can play the game for hours, repeatedly play it after finishing it, etc, and it'll be just as enjoyable as the first time you've played it.  It gets better the more you learn some of the games tricks as well, like cross classing.

Brigandine Grand Edition is Japanese only.  A remake of the original and it has a good amount of changes.  It also adds a two to six player multiplayer campaign where one person each can control a country while the computer AI controls the rest. 

WOWOWOWOWOWOW that looks like tits to me. :) I will try it, oh yeah I'm serious about Dark Wizard. Sega CD might be my fav console of all time, it was incredable! Tip in Dark Wizard level up like crazy in the first map!

Legend of Dragoon and Xenogears had the only turn based combat systems I truly loved. Everything else can go shove off.

I much prefer real time combat, or even better, something like Dragon Age where it's real time, but I can also pause it and very carefully micromanage every action.