Does not surprise me. This is pretty emblematic of an issue with most Square-Enix games aside from, like, Kingdom Hearts on Critical (and likely DQXI on the highest difficulties as well, didn't play it to know for sure): Difficulty balancing.
The games are just terrified of killing the player. I imagine in their view it's in order to not make people drop it in frustration, but in reality what happens is: your punishment for "playing it wrong" is that the game gets boring. And there's nothing worse than that. This shouldn't happen, if you're doing poorly the game should always kill you, to push you to do better, explore the mechanics and find the fun.
This was very apparent to me when I was once praising FFXIII's combat system, and someone answered saying "well, I got through that same fight just spamming auto battle and occasionally switching to heal. Took me forever, I got a shitty rating, but I don't care."
It shouldn't take players who strive for getting 5 stars in every encounter to enjoy the basic systems in the game, it should be a requirement just to complete it.
Whenever I see people saying "don't pass judgment before playing the demo 3 times or so", first thing that comes to my mind is that S-E shouldn't let people complete the demo before learning if that's the case. We shouldn't have to play the thing 3 times just to start having fun.