Efe
you could ask that about any video game. i recommend reading articles or preferably a nice book about the historical rise and fall of institutional casinos and then another book or other articles concerning what used to be called Game Theory.
it is very illuminating and applies to all videos and, interestingly enough,
applies most specifically to the type of games so-called RPG-fans like. Sorry if i sound pendantic but you ask such a misleading question and well, best i can do is give you the same tools i have utilized tobetter understand Gaming, with a capital G, as in: why do humans engage in games? what are games? what are rules?
etc. Of course the more specific game theory books are all about that sweet psychological manipulation, so granular and so ingrained in the very foundations of every single academic institute that concerns itself with the creation of consumer entertainment.
...but to answer at least your question in some way: all of what you ask about is, for me, completely without meaning. the only thing that is meaningful to the player is how his behavior and his response is triggered and ordered by the authorial contract of the RPG he or she is playing. It literally has no relevance what has what when doing who inside where:
-- all that matters is that the underlying centre of all of the systemic interdependencies that constitute what the player would experience as "game play" be well designed, and by well designed i merely mean that they excel in whatever the true intent of design may be coming from the game's designers. If all the parts not only are working correctly together but also independently of each other then true emergent game play experiences may be had by the player, and thus one can without question say for certain that, the game is then: Good.
everybody reacts to different stimuli in a unique way, and this applies not only to physical stimuli but the type of stimula that is found in the experience of playing a video game, i.e. currently the closest thing we have managed to get towards achieving virtual realities (in the virtual sense of the word, not in the holodeck sense).
so, too long didn't read = none of it matters and yet it also does matter, everything, and it has to work well together. the only thing most people think about usually are what genre is comprised of what makeup... more so than in music (with its infinite mathematical possibility and the fact that music touches the same regions of the brain as religoin and philosophy touch); video game genres are completely meaningless.
a blobber without combat would be, by EVERYONE, be called "not a blobber", yet that has no bearing on whether or not i would enjoy it. does that answer your question? because if you want a genre definition google will tell you that combat is the primary part, and some other results will tell you that the explarion is the primary part, and yet other articles and websites will emphasize the importance of the management of resources (and "resources" includes creating and growing a party of many characters, among all of the other variables in the game).
there is a point where somethjing is a technically representation of an abstracted concept or experience, a bottle-simulation, and there is another point where the concept reaches it's conclusive state. A blobber with
only rudimentary combat system, or this or that, or
only EXCELLENT combat system and nothing more... we're not asking here if it belongs to a genre, we are now discussing something that's basically not a video game.
i.e. pull the lever on the bingo machine all you want but it won't mean it's an RPG.
EDIT: and i hate using the term RPG at the end, there; for one thing we should discuss the fact that there is no such genre as the RPG.
it is a template upon which all of the other elements from other genres are supported, nothing more.