>>17
For Baldur's Gate, I always thought that had to do with scale and the death animations (where there were such things) not being enticing enough. There's perhaps also a level of character control at the heart of it as your characters are essentially jets - you point them where you want them to go and they do their thing on their own.
Regardless of my nostalgia for them, I really don't like combat systems for many old-style RPGs. I think you know what I'm talking about: all your party members share a single tight cluster and you only have an inventory screen, a dialogue screen, and a single view. They're usually story-good to me, but otherwise ...
I did, however, like Ultima (IV -> VII) and The Elder Scrolls series. I imagine an ideal system might use a combination of those two combat systems in strict real time, plus an expanded example of the squad ordering system you see in Freedom Fighters (which isn't RPG, but it's still has some of the better squad control of any non-RPG game I know) to allow for a wider range of organization (if that is what the party member wants ...).