I found this review of the Tactics Ogre remake by Oli Welsh to be very interesting in that it points directly at the divide between two schools of tactics RPG design. Welsh describes the difference between "the clean, intricate logic puzzles that represent the tactics genre at its best" and the "backroom RPG." In other words, the difference between Fire Emblem and Tactics Ogre. One of these is about moving characters around a map, the other is about obsessively micromanaging their builds to create vicious whirlwinds of death.
The thing is...Welsh is right! In many Fire Emblem games, you must deploy the right characters against the right enemies in the correct order to "unlock" a map. This requires thinking very carefully about how and when you make a move. Tactics Ogre will sometimes do this, but not always. The majority of maps come down to "defeat this enemy" or "defeat all enemies." Victory is often determined by advance preparation rather than "solving" a map. Tactics Ogre Reborn apparently limits the skills a character can use on each map to add an additional layer of planning, but the maps themselves remain as limited as ever.
I've seen a couple of folks online slam Tactics Ogre for this reason, arguing that its many complicated subsystems disguise a shallow tactical layer. The thing is, I still like Tactics Ogre a lot. It is not at all an "elegant" game in how its stages or various systems are designed. But I appreciate the flexibility that it gives the "backroom RPG" player. The fact that battles are looser in design gives you additional opportunities to field conceptually bizarre parties in battle. I'd be torn to pieces if I tried that in a Fire Emblem game (although I'm bad at Fire Emblem games!)
In a Retronauts episode about Final Fantasy Tactics (the descendant of Tactics Ogre) Shivam Bhatt compares the game's battles and class system to Dungeons and Dragons. I think he has something there. Instead of Fire Emblem, maybe we should be comparing Tactics Ogre to the fights in an old-school Gold Box RPG like Pool of Radiance. Both are old-fashioned, but I think there's still plenty to learn from old-fashioned things. I will say, though, that when I returned to Final Fantasy Tactics earlier this year I realized that Matsuno games are slow as molasses. Lose a battle and you've wasted 40 minutes of your life. Three Houses also felt slower than usual to me with its (charming) school layer. I hope the next entry speeds things up again!