I mention those games not for the gambit system of DA: O. But that your complaints for this sound like my complaints for CRPGs. They play in full real time, but if you want to actually control your whole 4-6 person party, you need to press space bar to pause constantly. I've found that annoying and wished that they would have just made it turn-based.
But this is not having that effect on me. Part of it might well be the fact that it's slow motion and not frozen, but I think more than that is that you have a more direct way to engage the combat and will spend most of your time doing so. The issue for me with the CRPGs is that the ONLY way for fighting to occur is to issue each member a command (ignoring DA: O's gambits for the moment). And then all the moves take a different amount of time to go off and so now the charcters aren't even synced up for when you should pause to issue new ones, etc. In this you will be fighting in real time while your other characters fight according to their base AI scripts, including with your short cuts, and then only when a bar fills and you need a heal or have an opening or a Limit or something, the action slows enough for you to engage that, and then continues on. And the shortcut settings decrease the frequency with which you'll need the tactical menu further.
Obviously having not played it myself I don't know for certain, but it doesn't give me the feeling that it would annoy me the way those games did.
Another example is FTL. To play best, you do have to pause a lot to issue detailed commands, but a lot of time you can just play on the fly if the battle isn't too intense. And so only pausing when necessary or to use a special missile or something never got on my nerves.