Huge WIP. I deliberately pushed a bunch of the Act II concepts out early because I wanted people actually hammering on them before I built 7+ entire regions on top of bad assumptions.
You're right about the complete-stop behaviour feeling jarring after Act I. There may still be a few actions where deliberately stopping first makes sense, but having to hit Stop constantly just to change what you're doing is not something I want as the normal Act II experience. The challenge fights are in the same category. The current manual handling is scaffolding, not the intended final grind loop, and I want repeated fights to eventually behave much closer to the automation players are already used to from Willowbrook and the wildernesses.
Soul Forging is also much less complete than it looks right now. It isn't supposed to boil down to "train an Aspect until expression reaches 100%, then equip the obvious thing." There are a lot of surrounding systems and actual things to spend/use Aspects on that simply do not exist yet, so at the moment the optimal answer naturally collapses into "cultivate more." That is one of the bigger things I'm working on now.
Basically, you have wandered into the construction site while the walls are still arguing about where the doors go. Keep the comments coming though, because this is exactly when those problems are useful to catch.