1. most of that is personal prefererence so ok
(Keep in mind I'm not trying to start a flame war here, I just want to explain my point of view a bit more clearly)
When it comes to what I said about character design then sure, you could say that's personal preference, but I think we can all agree that - again - if a story driven game doesn't have a good story then it cannot really be considered all that good. Sure, there can be a good game without a good (or no) story but not only KH is an RPG (and I think it's pretty safe to say that the story matters a lot in an RPG) but it's also pretty obvious that the devs gave a lot of space to it in these specific games. In fact, if I really have to be completely objective and unbiased about it, the gameplay might not be completely bad but it's also not really all that special - there are arguably many better hack and slash games out there, even on the good ol' PS2 itself. So I really feel that in order to like KH as a game you must like the story to at least some extent and I don't know about you, but most people I've met that like or dislike it pretty much confirm what I've said so far.
I would like them to lean more into it if they are going to (good intentions, incredibly poor knowledge base and execution is mostly how I would sum that world up). However it does not seem like it is happening to all games like we sometimes get for other fads and plenty of people. Equally game design does recognise the need, or at least it being highly desirable, for competitive games to be engaging at all points during the game for all players, no matter their chances of winning.
It's not something that happens as much as other fads, true, but it's something that I've seen happening more and more as time goes on. Sure, nobody's going to like an unfair game so there must be at least a little bit of balance in every situation but sometimes making a game too balanced might actually be worse. Think about this: would you like Mario Kart as much if everyone could only get the same weapon everytime? And in order to make a real life example of this, while it might not be a popular game by any means, that's exactly what happened to Formula Fusion: it was meant to be a spiritual successor to WipEout (aka Mario Kart with spaceships if you've never played it) and while it's not bad in itself - I personally had some fun playing it - they definitely focused too much on making every weapon and pickup balanced because they wanted to make the game, quote, "e-sport ready" so you really start to wish they'd kept some of the old overpowered but really fun to use ones such as Plasma (slow, single shot, OHKO) or Quake (as the name implies, creates a giant wave that hits everything in its path). Another infamous example is Battlefront II which, sure, that game has so many other worse problems but again, EA and Dice said it was going to be competitive while, well, let's just say that competitiveness and loot that gives real gameplay advantages don't really mix togheter (and hey - I'm not saying that making this specific game non-competitive would do it any justice, I've brought BFII up simply because it tried to mix two ongoing trends in the gaming industry).
In the end, this might not be as bad or frequent as other bad trends out there (forcing games to be open world when it isn't really needed, loot boxes/mtx, season passes, day one DLC and abusing the early access tag to sell unpolished/unfinished games just to name a few) but it's something I feel could get ugly pretty quickly if this keeps up.