This is where I'm at. A fast-forward button seems to be a band-aid to a problem that they don't want to bother fixing. Combat still looks slow as molasses.
It's a bandaid on a problem that the entire genre suffers from. There's been a few games that've tried alternate approaches, like Chrono Cross making regular combat largely unimportant in character advancement, but by and large, JRPGs still operate on the assumption that you should be fighting monsters of no great import (and usually, zero story-relevance) every X seconds/minutes.
Until we move past the silly concept that RPGs in general *must* be about mechanical character progression and that the best method of progression is fighting a lot, we're going to keep seeing these sorts of "quick fix" solutions.