Tide, I definitely think Shadow Hearts: Covenant was balanced around it being okay to screw up the Judgment Ring a lot and still succeed. Which is fine by me; if you want to show off your Judgment Ring skillz, there's Technical Rings & Minds Eye & all, but otherwise, no need to condition being good at the Judgment Ring too heavily on being able to complete the game. I had a pretty good fight with the final boss myself when I did it sans side quests, I certainly wasn't even close to OHKOing everything, but that was also no Keys / Mind's Eye / etc. I'm not a super-huge Judgment Ring fanatic myself so I'd rather the RPG aspect be more challenging, not the memorizing invisible hit zones part be more challenging. 
Still, Lady w/ no sidequests >>> Kato w/ no sidequests, that isn't up for debate.
Oh, that's definitely the case. There was an interview I read somewhere (Shadow Hearts wiki?) that mentioned that the designers got complains about the ring in SH1 so they wanted to tone down the ring elements in SH2. They added the Hit and Strike expands as a result. It wouldn't surprise me that that decision is also why the strike zones are a mile wide and all the broken gets given to you like candy. In terms of learning invisible rings, you only really need to learn 1 to break the game and the best (and EASIEST) person for this is Yuri. This is just due to the position of his ring being near one of the indicators on SH2's ring art. From there you just stack like all the Strike expands to make it the hardest thing in the world to miss. It's much more reasonable to do this than in SH3 where the custom ring items were a) much rarer and b) if you were using the magic version, you had to memorize rings for all the different spells, which is many more than one.
As you noted already, SH2 - if you hit your judgment rings all the time - is balanced on the easy side, so I'm not sure if I'm going to hit Kurando for being TOO FAST so that he can't use Lucia's buff on turn 1. It's okay, SHC enemies will generally let Kurando live to turn 2 so that he can use Lucia's buff then.
To be fair to Kurando, being too fast isn't his primary problem. Blanca is usually too fast as well. The way to circumvent this is pretty simple. You can either use Seal of Speeds on Lucia (which is what I did) or you can keep Kurando at a lower level so his speed doesn't end up being as high. Being fast is a concern but one that you can manage due to manipulating speeds with recharge times. However, Blanca being able to equip Crest spells is where he has a huge advantage over Kurando because he can open off with a secondary buff such as Arc Shield/Barrier/Surge and wait for Lucia before casting the big guns such as Rage/Gale/Entrance. Meanwhile, Kurando goes first and does uh...jack. I guess he can hit some dude for a piddly 500 damage, but that's chump change when everyone else is doing 4 digits. Optimally, you want to be fast enough such that you can sneak a second turn in BEFORE Lucia's second turn. That way you get the strike booster for an extra turn but this requires some hefty speed manipulation (which I did accomplish >_>) so I don't hold that against Kurando.
Also what Grefter said. But less 'git gud' and more just SH2 enemies have piss poor HP so they get one shot'd without much effort.
Tide, since you have finish the game, do you want to heard things you might or might want to know about the game from me?
Sure, go ahead. I don't think it's a spoiler for anyone at this point. And if it is, SPEAK NOW OR FOREVER HOLD YOUR PEACE, etc.
Mind Eye worst item confirmed
Pls Fenrir. Mind's Eye, what is this baby garbage. I just use the Extreme
Incidentally, I never understood how that score system worked or what you get points for. Like I did the same things as I did in Shadow Hearts FtNW and I am rank like 21 versus just a rank of like 60 here. I heard, at least for SH3, that you can get a higher score by just grindan the randoms, which seems like a pretty silly scale if you ask me!
Also checking the ring data, I have an overall strike rate of about 77%, with most characters around that area, except Anastasia and Kurando. Anastasia is at 90%, Kurando, 43%. Kurando confirmed having the most garbage ring.
