1 Heron is obligatory, so he is ussually the best choice of the 3 because of the advantage he has in his transformed state.

It's amusing that you actually brought Volke.  Then again, I guess we're allowed to play favorites.  I mean, I bring Mist to endgame for fun.

The stat maniacs @ GameFAQS would probably call me an amateur for that, but I simply love Volke. My favorite from PoR. He wasn't really useful in the endgame, but being 99% sure he'll crit is pretty awesome.

I don't pay too much atention to pure statistics. Once a character is good enough it's mainly personality and class.

It's weird.  Even if you pick some weaker characters, there are so many strong ones that you'll end up with a good team anyway.  As long as you play intelligently, the end of Radiant Dawn is pretty simply regardless of your team.

Lots of reviews I read of Radiant Dawn criticized its difficulty. I had played Path of Radiance previously but not any other Fire Emblem game, and yet I didn't find it that hard at all. I don't really understand why that was such a big criticism. Anyone else agree?

 Did it start like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgiRVUwr8wM?

Not really. The first time I played it (on normal. It was my first FE ever), I couldn't finish the endgame. I wasn't even close.

... Maybe I didn't play intelligently though (I probably didn't).

So I ended up restarting on Easy. Then the first 3 were too easy, so I decided it wouldn't be a lot of fun, and thus tried on my Normal save. Turns out, my characters were so messed up I was virtually chanceless. I had gotten a lot of good units thrown at me (at the end, you do get  a lot of good characters), but I still couldn't do it (pass the 3rd one, with dragons).

(I then started it on Hard and finished it eventually, but that's not very relevant).

Err, I didn't really get to a conclusion there. You are good enough at Fire Emblem to not mess up and level up retarded units only.

(That wasn't what I originally planned to say, but I wrote the above a few hours before this).

Radiant Dawn's less-than-recommended units:  Meg, Fiona, Tormod/Maurum/Vika, Jill, Astrid, and all Laguz outside the Royals and Ranulf.

I've used most of them but I wouldn't recommend them unless you're very familiar with the game.

Yeah, I know that now. I didn't know that then. And the problem was more the combination of my units, rather than the units standalone.

Oh well, you live and learn.

Ah, so you've poked your nose into the FE boards at GameFAQs, have you. I was on the RD board for a time, myself (mostly through my second RD playthrough).

Those folks can really suck the fun out of it.