As others said, all the thinking of this game happens before the battles, but it doesn't become necessary until elite bosses (although, in the harder FFVI elite dungeons you need to pay attention even during the mundane mobs).
The problems are: 1) the interface is terrible, so the whole setting up your team thing becomes an unnecessary pain in the ass; 2) sometimes it doesn't matter how prepared you are if RNGod is not your side.
On 2), I just had to restart the Vargas fight 5 times because Aeris kept getting killed before she could even cast the first cura on herself. The first try they finally decided to attack someone else, I finished it without a single character dying. You can argue that I was not adequately prepared by betting in only one healer, but, well, if I had two they'd probably both die before doing any action haha.
But I didn't get mastery, which means I'll have to try this again... Fuck me. The problem is not even the boss, but going through all the stages and being forced to use cura. If Aeris hadn't leveled up halfway through, I wouldn't have managed.
On the content update, I think they'll only happen next week. In the Japanese version, this update added a bunch of abilities, including counter-attack, firaga, thundaga, blizzaga, curaja, so I foresee a lot of orb farming in the future...
As for crashes, I've had none today, but the connection is failing a few times, which doesn't really happen normally.
And random, is there any reason why our Tidus is nerfed? He has 109 attack at level 50 in the
Japanese version, against only
94 here. In fact, Paladin Cecil, Kain and Tifa are nerfed as well. Is just another attempt of making the game harder for us or did they get buffed in the Japanese version later?
And a tip: Don't grind-level up your main party all the way to level 50. Leave them at level 48. These two levels won't make any difference for elite dungeons and you won't waste xp when doing them.
Guess I won't be getting any weapon upgrades this week.