Well, I prefer turn based combat because that's what an RPG should be like. Stats mattering more than the twitch reflex of the person playing. Once games go real time, it becomes increasingly twitchy. I had this issue going back to games like "Eye Of The Beholder" when they tried real time RPG combat for the very first time I believe, and simply put it made spellcasting a serious pain in the keister, and pretty much demonstrated why you can't really create and carefully control your own party in a real time enviroment.
In general I think JRPGs haven't evolved much becayse they are perfect for what they do. Your either a fan, or your not. For a lot of the "twitch based" FPS generation which outnumbers us RPG fans, the conventions are anethma. Action RPGs are an attempt to create RPGs that will hit more than a niche market, and while decent, most of them don't appeal to me as much as a "true" turn based RPG.
Truthfully though while JRPGs are true to their genere, I vastly prefer the "dead" school of true WRPGs. Wizardry, Might and Magic, Ultima (pre Pagan). The closest I've seen recently has been "Dragon Age", but honestly that missed the fun of creating my own party from scratch. I miss being able to make say a Faerie Ninja, a Lizardman Fighter, or a Fellpurr Samurai. Never mind the good old fashioned "annoyance" of rolling my attributes as opposed to being handed a pool of points which is the best you generally see today.
I also suspect going back in time and assasinating certain members of the Might and Magic 3 design team might do the genere some good. Truthfully I miss the day when each item was hand crafted and assigned stats by a real person. Today you only see that for special items, and typically they wind up lacking compared to the "dial a lewt" tables. I ceased to get much satisfaction from games that rolled a prefix, base, and suffix, especially when some of them get really redundant and silly sounding. Oh gee, I just randomly rolled a Luddite's Laser Bow of The Flies... and the game tells me it's somehow made out of Ebony.
I understand some people enjoy that, but it irks me. It was interesting the first couple of times, in part for the laugh factor, but now it's just become a refuge for lazy programmers with no grounding in classic RPGs (pnp or otherwise).
