Yeah, I realized far late in my run that the fights in the mine were not required but, it was a hassle since I thought that I needed to clear out all 4 of the wandering mobs, since I had missed talking to one of the stationary goblins.
As for the animations, it might just be me but each animation feels ok on it's own but when you have 2-3 enemies with both party members it adds up for each round of combat. Maybe if the attack and hit/dodge animations played simultaneously (unless I missed that they were). Also, I found that Grace's magic was required on basically all the fights, so that might be the problem on my end.
I also ran into a thing that you can go to the library without Gallium and find out about the goblin language scroll, then go right to the guard for the letter without ever having Gallium involved, so you basically sequence break getting the info.