Well see I don't know how I'd add that up. Is strength  flat buff? So if you add 24 strength it adds 24 to your attack? Is their a reduction? etc

I'm guessing the 30% would be better since my attacks are going up to the 100s, then again it's only an auto buff

The 24 strength would add to all your "physical arts damage" while the 30% auto attack will, well, add to your auto-attacks, while keeping that in mind, you are the only who can test for efficiency here as we don't know your character's base stats. Just experiment on it until you find what damage output is the best.

Edit: Btw, I think you already know this, but cancelling your auto-attacks gets you to fill your special arts faster, that means, you won't be using much of your auto-attacks damage output, which will also depend on your weapon/attack animations so just keep that in mind while experimenting.

How is the inventory management, side-quest amount and menus? Probably my most major gripe with the original game

In my opinion, and based on what I have played so far, inventory management and menus are really good.They are well presented and easy to understand, and item are separted by category.You will eventually get alot of acessory, which you will need to eventually sell(otherwise you will have a bloated section in the acessory tab) but its good.

Side-quests is a more personal matter.I found the normal side quests decents.Some of them taught you how the local culture and economy(those sorts of things) work, so I found them enjoyable.There are better side quests, which are the affinity quests with the rare blades that have cutscenes and all in them, but I have only participated in one of them so far.

But yeah, far better than the first XC, and I would say about the same quality, if not a little better, than the ones in XCX.

I kind of like the RNG proposed here, but I hate it at the same time. My Nia has only one rare healer aside from Dromarch, lots of tanks, and the fourth party member, which is a tank, has a ton of attackers and few healers, but not a single tank aside from its starter Blade (which is amazing, it's the only one that has pulled me 200K+ of damage in a single IV level special attack so far). It's annoying.

I'd love to exchange thm, but I'm among of those guys that wasted those scarce Overdrive Protocols on common Blades and on Rex. People have been saying they've been getting them from 100+ level enemies, but that's like an eternity compared to where I'm standing right now. Is releasing the rare Blades and trying again truly the only solution at the moment? 

The maps in this game are absolutely awful and can make it hard to understand where you're supposed to go in some areas. 

The menus I think are nice once you get used to them. They're a bit of a mess but that's kind of to be expected with how much stuff there is in the game.

The side quests are numerous though the quality is sub par. I will say in the first major town you go to you get like ... 5 side quests? It seemed somewhat limited but i'm guessing they did that so you wouldn't be too overleveled for the main story beats. There was one I really liked involving a nopon farm. 

A problem I've had when trying to get into other JRPGs(including Xenoblade) is that you get a bunch of shit that you can either ignore completely or unknowingly is really important. You always get a bunch of crap and you rarely know what to do with it. I think the tutorial explains somewhat well what you can do with miscellaneous items, so you should be fine as far as inventory management goes (if that's what you mean?_

Nautilus and Alchemist already answered your question nicely, but I just wanted to add that inventory management is a fair amount more tolerable than the last two games. Instead of deciding between 5 armors and a weapon, you give each character two accessories and a Blade partner, to which you'll give 2-3 power-up items. On top of that, there are...maybe 6 stats to keep track of this time around, rather than the wall of numbers from the previous game, so it's pretty easy to decide which character will get what.

I don't think inventory management is as easy as...say, the Tales of series, but it's a marked improved over the last two. I thought I'd chime in since, like you, inventory management was an absolute nightmare for me in the previous games, so much so that I stopped playing XCX 50 hours in because sorting through my items would just give me a constant headache.

I know this thread says no spoilers but ... HOLLLLLYYYY SHITTT!! The pre-release pics of that cool blond blade ... THOSE WERE PYRA'S REAL FORM?!?!?!?! OMG! I hate Pyra! Just give me blondie! She looks so cool! 

I played like three and a half hours so far. I got to the first open area in the game. So far my only compaint is combat. It's super slow, even more than in Xenoblade Chronicles. Having to stand still to attack, the sluggish way the characters move while in battle mode, how when you use anchor shot you have to stop attacking and look around to get that damn potion and the fact that many times you'll have to lure monsters one by one because for some reason there is a fucking level 17 bird flying in circles around a group of enemies that I want to kill....

Maybe I'll end up liking it, I don't know. Maybe when I get more than two characters and many blades this will turn into something fun. As for now... it's pretty bad. I enjoyed the original Xenoblade combat far more than this... even at the start when you only had Shulk and Reyn.

I just had all my quests erased in Chapter 5. Some glitch where my sidequests were just erased and I can't complete them anymore.