I can see the usefulnes of auto-battle in certain situations - no matter how well planned your battle system and enemies are, you may still have SOME tedious, "pointless" battles here and there (and the presence of ANY such battles at all throughout an entire game is not a big deal, honestly. As long as it's not happening often.) I agree that the "everyone just does basic attack until the enemies are dead or you cancel auto-battle" is far preferable to having the computer pick which skills/spells to use. The latter rarely works well - if the fight is worthy of strategy, I want to decide what to do myself; if the fight is easy-peezy and I'm using auto-battle because I just want to zoom past it, then why would I want to waste any MP?
In regards to "grinding" being fun (or not)...
To a degree, I see what Fernyfer and Uzuki are saying. However, without meaning to put words in Eschaton's mouth, I'd think that was he was getting at was "forced" grinding, i.e. "I have been playing normally, I haven't run from many battles, I've done most of the sidequests available to me thus far, and I am WAY underleveled for the next required boss. Through no fault of my own, I must grind to continue the game."
THAT specific kind of scenario is, I feel, one that any game designer should try to avoid if possible. Of course, if your battle system is fun and your game does encourage exploration, it's likely that your players will be battling a LOT (grinding of their own free will, basically, which is what Fernyfer and Uziku are talking about I think). Which is fine... except then, if your game is balanced to avoid the scenario I described above, you can then run the risk of it being too easy for a player to grind too much and OVER level, and all of the required boss fights are a breeze simply because your player decided to explore a lot (which your game encouraged). So it's a bit of a tightrope to walk, really.
For my money, I would find an RPG (in the traditional JRPG or western RPG sense, anyway) where there was literally a finite number of total battles that could be fought to be off-putting. The way I interpreted Eschaton's statement about the solution being making each battle interesting wasn't "limit the number of battles that can be fought", but to make fewer battles, i.e. on a per area basis. Meaning, instead of a dungeon having full random encounters or dozens of touch-encounter critters wandering around that are mostly very difficult to avoid, forcing the player to fight (or at best, run from) dozens of relatively easy, same-y encounters through the course of one dungeon, you have a dungeon with maybe only one dozen or so encounters total, each of which is actually a bit of a challenge and, ideally, most of which are a bit different from one another in terms of type of enemies, etc. BUT, they still all respawn when you leave the dungeon and come back. So you have fewer battles per stretch of game time, with each encounter being more memorable than your average mindless random battle, and the player does not feel inundated with constant encounters. But other than bosses and some special treasure guarding monsters and whatnot, none of those battles would go away permanently after being fought once.
There are other things you can do, too, such as trying to make your battle system and enemies respond to strategy or skill loadout more than pure levels. I acknowledge that this can be quite hard to do, but it's something to shoot for (and is why your battle system, skills, and enemies shouldn't be rushed! They should receive as much care and thoughtful design as any other part of the game, if not more so). I'm reminded of Star Ocean 3, which was a great example of this. Some of the bosses (and regular encounters too, fairly often) in that game were damn hard if you weren't prepared. But, I hardly ever had to just grind out more levels after being beaten by a boss; I'd shuffle around what skills I had equipped and tried to think about how I could use them (i.e., for this one boss fight that was a group of enemies that rapid-fire at you with blasters that do heavy damage and can turn you to stone, which seemed like a massive challenge... until I tried out a skill that knocks the enemy off their feet and discovered that I could knock em all down at once if I used it carefully, and suddenly the battle wasn't nearly as hard).
Lastly, one other system I like is one that gives the player a bit of information about the encounter's nature from the graphic used on the map (obviously this only works for touch encounters, but I advocate for them over full random battles in nearly all situations anyway). i.e. something like, standard enemies are yellow, and will move toward you and initiate battles if you get near them, aggressive enemies are red and will gun for you from farther away the moment you enter the room, green enemies won't move toward you and you must approach and press the action button if you want to fight them at all, etc. Generally, the more aggressive an enemy on the map, the more challenging the fight would be. These would be fewer in number but more interesting, requiring more thought to win. Whereas yellows and greens might be more plentiful, but are easier to avoid (and easier to win). So the player can, to some degree, decide for themselves how many less challenging, "filler" fights they want to engage in.
This could also completely solve the issue of what to do if the player needs to backtrack through an old area. In some cases, you could use the method of leveling up the old enemies, or swapping them out for new ones, so the area becomes a challenge again, but you wouldn't necessarily always want to do this. Sometimes it would be better to let the player just zip through the backtracking portion as quickly as possible. So the encounter info system described above could help with this: if you are a certain number of levels above an enemy encounter, it becomes green automatically. So ALL the enemies in a really old area would be green and would just stay out of your way (but if the player WANTS to run toward em and fight em again for whatever reason, they still can).
