This Japanese PGMMV developer I follow on Twitter is doing a very elaborate beat 'em up project.
You might be interested in seeing, he does use a lot of syntax I believe:
https://twitter.com/Moebius090
That's funny you mention that as the biggest challenge for you, I had the same issue in my submission since there's a grapple mechanic. The solution I ended up going with was using attack detections with attribute changes so that a specific value would be checked to indicate a grab (while a different one indicated getting attacked). But there's a small caveat, sometimes that 'grab' attack detection seems to kill an enemy instead of grabbing them, if the collision happens on a very tiny frame window. So it works most of the time, not all the time. Which is unfortunate, but I couldn't figure out a different approach that actually worked. Was your solution different?
Coma State Eden (my submission to the 2019 PGMMV Game Dev Challenge) is like that for me. Honestly with any art or craft, if you want to make something good it's going to be really hard and time consuming. There's lots of details and you can't ever ignore a good idea. It's definitely worth it though, you have to make something you would actually play the hell out of. That's when the work turns out better and you're having a lot of fun.