I should probably give RTWP another chance. I'm mid pathfinder wotr playthrough and I might give it a shot. I'm playing on the steam deck so we'll see if it's agreeable. I think at least for the fodder battles it might be nice.
I wanted to rant about how this made no sense and no one would do this but we have a firmware team at work that does this shit constantly. Nothing is ever properly ported between code bases
At least the owlcat games have turn based and RTWP if you want it. I never liked real time with pause though, and actually won't play games that strictly enforce it.
I just started with my wife on classic as well... Well, 30 hours ago, but as you know with these games that's basically the tutorial.
Definitely similar to BG3 but much simpler in many, many ways. You can tell where bg3 came from.