No, penguinwizard, keep on making long posts. They're awesome.
I agree with much of the article, but something that caught my eye was his mention of Kingdom Hearts.
While I can agree with that sentiment for Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, and especially Kingdom Hearts II, the systems used in Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days make grinding not only a far more tedious task than in pretty much any other JRPG, but one that in the long run will have absolutely no effect on much of the game. In addition to presenting a somewhat higher difficulty than previous games in the series (particularly considering the lack of QTE-based attacks, which were all but omnipresent in Kingdom Hearts II), 358/2 Days includes special challenges where your level (among other things) is capped, so grinding levels won't help you at all. Instead, you must rely on how well you know the panel system and your actual skill.
(I almost made a similar argument for The World Ends With You until I remembered that the post-game consists of grinding forever to max out your stats via food. However, TWEWY still requires more actual skill than other JRPGs, as grinding to max out your stats via food during the story is simply not possible without DS time travel, and so you must still rely on your actual skills and ability to pay attention to two screens at once if you want to survive, particularly if you're the kind of player who raises the difficulty and drops to level one.)
In most cases, I enjoy turn-based RPGs, J or otherwise, for everything except the gameplay. Calling them RPGs is in most cases inaccurate; many of them resemble visual novels (some of which in turn often resemble JRPGs) far more than they do actual games. This also applies to many "action" RPGs and practically all turn-based strategy RPGs. However, saying JRPGs suck or that you can't play them for anything other than story because of their no-skill nature is absurd.
Let's look at a few examples to see what kind of things I'm comparing: The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road (or RIZ-ZOAWD), Dokapon Journey, and Custom Battler Bomberman (released in Europe as Bomberman II, but still not available in the US). All of these are DS games, and all are RPGs to some extent. They all differ in major ways, however.
The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road is a creative retelling of L. Frank Baum's wonderful story about a girl whisked away to a fantastic land of magic and talking beasts. Its combat system is incredibly basic and makes no efforts at any point to show at least some depth. Yet the game clearly isn't about combat. It's about the story of Dorothy and her new friends and their quest to aid the Wizard and save the land. Enemies fit into one of four simple themed groups, each weak to a particular character; meanwhile, outside of battle, the game showcases the ability of the DS to display lush, colorful landscapes and fluid 3D animation. (The music's not half bad, either.) RIZ-ZOAWD is more an interactive story than a game, moreso even than other JRPGs, but it doesn't really try to be anything other than that, and it works.
Dokapon Journey could be described as Mario Party-meets-Dragon Quest-as-JRPG-rather-than-Itadaki Street. Players take turns moving around the game board/world, fighting monsters in turn-based combat, picking up items and spells, liberating towns, and hindering each other's progress along the way. Like RIZ-ZOAWD, the game also makes no effort to be skill-based - after all, it's difficult to have much to do with skill when players spin to see how many spaces they can move each turn. Unlike that previous game, Dokapon Journey isn't really about the story - while the game contains a story mode (with a possible lesbian ending!), its other modes are shorter are are more like Mario Party but with turn-based combat instead of minigames. Dokapon Journey focuses on players having fun playing a JRPG in the form of a nonlinear board game, rather than focusing on an in-depth story or impressive graphics.
Finally, Custom Battler Bomberman is a standard stage-based Bomberman game, with its cyberpunk atmosphere being its main hook. The story, as with many Bomberman games, is forgettable; players control the computer program Bomberman and combat virus-based invaders or something. At first this sounds enough like Mega Man Battle Network to turn many players away, Hudson wisely chose to develop a mostly-traditional Bomberman game using this setting, rather than crafting a series of mostly-mediocre-or-worse JRPGs that will not die. Custom Battler Bomberman contains some RPG elements; in addition to raising his stats by picking up panels within levels like in previous games, Bomberman can wear equipment to change his base stats and grant abilities such as bomb kicking and remote detonation. Each piece of equipment has a certain point value, and Bomberman can only equip up to a certain point level. Bomberman gains experience and levels up through normal play, and each level increases only the point cap. With the standard Bomberman gameplay largely unchanged and players usually being able to find a good combination of items without fighting with the point cap, level-grinding is both unnecessary and pointless, and the RPG aspect doesn't play anywhere near as large a role in progression as a player's ability to play Bomberman. (Note also that while a local multiplayer mode allows players to use their customized Bomberman in battle, WFC play is standard Bomberman only.) Custom Battler Bomberman is, like many games today, not what's normally considered an RPG, but rather a normal game with RPG elements. A lot of games seem to be moving in this direction. And as long as they're good like Custom Battler Bomberman and don't get bogged down by the RPG elements like Hellgate: London or something, I'm cool with that.
(As a side note, I certainly love "performance-based" games like JRPGs and visual novels, but I also love "mastery-based" fare like rhythm games, shmups, and platformers, and I play games from the latter group for a different reason than those from the former. I enjoy stuff like Final Fantasy IV and Fate/stay night one way, and I enjoy things like beatmania IIDX, Battle Garegga, and Umihara Kawase Shun SE another. Mind you, this all gets thrown out the window when I play something like Etrian Odyssey or The Dark Spire, but...)