Dagsion, and what it means for something to be optional
There's been a few threads lately going over Dagsion and free time activities along with plenty of posts and discussions that effectively boil down to "Of course you dislike it, you're trying to minmax it. Don't you know this is optional? You don't need to engage with it in order to complete the game."
The same kind of discussion popped up around the time of Three Houses' release, and around that time I also made a thread pointing out what it means to treat that content as if it wasn't there. I feel like the exact same discourse is happening, and it's a little silly.
Yes, you can beat the game without really engaging with its systems and simply auto-turning everything from battle to battle. You'll still have to engage with the odd story mandatory dungeon and the odd map exploration (for example the ship segment in Dietrich's route), but let's discount those. But like, that's not satisfying is it? Like on the face of it, it's leaving so much behind.
First of all, training is required in order to train your units in abilities they do not natively come with. If you want to make someone use a weapon type different from whatever they came with, you have to do this. This could be because you want the ability on that class, or because you want the growths for a few levels, or it could simply be because you're using someone who's default class is garbage like Ninae ending up in cav instead of armor.
Secondly, speaking of classes - how exactly are you supposed to promote without engaging with the system? You won't have enough advanced seals for everyone if you don't buy some from the world map in part 1, there are classes that are directly locked behind doing a bunch of tedious tasks on the world map, and you need level 8 renown to unlock promotions to tier 3 in the first place. This will be severely delayed if you don't do side quests.
How about recruitment? Well, some units do indeed come for basically free. Alexandra on Theodora's route is a 1 support recruit, fair enough, we're cool. Two support? Well, that's just a few meals, that's okay. Three supports? Brother, get buckled in because you'll be eating with that character for two months. I've seen people say you're being made to make tough decisions about who you can recruit, and strictly speaking that's true because you can't recruit everyone unless you hyper optimize or use the support exploit. But like, did it have to be spamming 15 meals? Couldn't it be limited some other way that didn't take so much of my precious time?
Vandahl's company won't escape my ire either. I think it's actually cool to have a shop with more limited inventory that lets you buy weapons that are ahead of the level curve. Especially in a game with no real durability, it's important to limit what access you have to those weapons. But it's limited behind these tasks.
To bring it all together, my biggest issue is that while yes, any of these tasks on an individual level are not that tedious, each one is individually worth doing or the reward and it adds up to a lot of tedium. It feels like there's a lot of Not Playing Fire Emblem in my Fire Emblem game. Sure, I could skip training, but can't you see why that would be disappointing? It makes my unit weaker, not because I have decided that it's a bad decision to trade money for exp. Just because it's tediously designed. If you made it cost 4x as much and give 4x as much exp, I'd like it a lot more since it'd make it less tedious without messing with the balance.
It's frustrating to me because a lot of these things just... Had other ways to obtain them in previous games. It's optional, but I was never told I had to do some nonsense sidequest fetch quests in order to unlock a class. Either I had it, or I didn't. Especially when those classes are genuinely fun to play with. Restricting weapons was done with chests in maps or per-chapter shops, why do we need to go hunt for 10 fish so a dude will give us a levin sword? Recruitment was never that interesting to me, but surely "You want to use this character but they take 15 meals to max out" isn't a good thing, right? Yeah, it's optional to use Ninae, but I want to use Ninae. Not to minmax, just because I want to use her, and yet she's been level 3 support to recruit in every route which is tedious as hell.
tl;dr yeah it's optional but only if you don't care about several core features, not even from a min-max standpoint but from a "Engaging with what should be core mechanics of the game" feature.