It mostly comes down to four things, as I understand it:
- We need to regularly unstagnate our Combat domain if we want to keep our XP rate, which is important even for our research stats. Unstagnations require higher combat stats for two reasons:
- For any given unstagnation, the difficulty we need to clear is based on what our stats used to be at the last unstagnation, not what they currently are. A steady growth of combat stats means we always have a comfortable margin of advantage against the difficulty target we need to hit.
- A well-rounded build is more likely to survive in general. As it stands we can do some pretty neat things but we have to dance around the problem where any major attack aimed at Hazou will hit and do massive damage. Bringing our base stats up to snuff means Hazou can't get mulched as easily, gives us more room to work around our foes.
- There are things we don't do because we don't trust Hazou in a fight. I don't have many good examples of this, perhaps because we're long practiced at this point at taking different kinds of strategies, but I can think of two costs in recent memory: we had to flee the beyond-the-map wilderness because the chuunin of Team Uplift were too frail to expect to stay alive long-term, and there's not even a chance that Hazou's going to personally participate in the final battle against the Akatsuki.
- Sometimes fate forces our hand. The Fourfold Seal of Protection sealing failure comes to mind, where our unwavering commitment to rescue our clanmate caused us to dive into fights we didn't know were safe. We took a Severe there, almost died, as a result of it. You may ask "what are the odds something exactly like that happens again?", but while history doesn't repeat itself it does tend to rhyme. If we want to survive in the long-term we do need to plan on the expectation that we will be forced into fights we didn't pre-select to be safe.
- In ninjaland it turns out nobody respects you if you can't punch their face in. It's dumb, but true. We're developing into a major geopolitical player here and it'd be really nice if we had Jounin-level street cred so we didn't have to start every conversation with a metaphorical "okay I know that I don't look like much, but..."
And, I should stress, the reason we're talking about this at all is in anticipation of a relatively favourable outcome against Akatsuki. Once we're no longer racing them for the rift, once the dust has settled and our weapons have done their work, it actually becomes an open question how much we need more research skill. I can see some routes where it's important for rift-delving, but just as easily I can see routes where we have essentially everything we need and can afford to divert our XP into "don't die" stats.
We had to lock in on research mode, to the exclusion of all else, because timers were ticking down to doomsday and victory directly hinged on whether we could research fast enough to win. If we handle the Akatsuki here the only major timers left are retrieving Jiraiya and Akane before it's too late (which may or may not require much research investment) and the overall degradation of the Great Seal (which is long-term enough that having the stats to stay alive that long becomes part of the process). In a dozen chapters we might finally,
finally be free of this vice-grip of time pressure where the Sonic drowning music is blaring in our ears 24/7 because if we aren't researchmaxxing 130% of the time we auto-lose. Once we're free of immediate concerns we can finally turn our attention to the stuff we left on the wayside in the process. I'm not personally married to the combat grind, I'm in a "wait and see how the fate-of-the-world showdown turns out" position first and foremost, but I can definitely see the value in it for our mid-to-long-term goals.
