IMHO, the topic talks about RPGs, not aRPGs aka loot hunters/diablo likes and such. That is a very clear distinction. I know some people consider as an RPG anything where you distribute ANY points into anything but the difference between these 2 genres is extremely noticeable. In aRPG, anything that delays you from killing/questing/gaining EXP is not preferable.

I'm in the exact opposite camp and I loathe RPGs or RPG-ish games where all quests are documented the moment they become available or where all quests are acquired in the same manner. It's the main reason I didn't bother finishing Fable II or Dying Light even though I enjoyed Fable and loved Dead Island. This kind of thing kills any sense of agency or any reason to explore a game world, as far as I'm concerned, and makes these games utterly boring to me. I'm okay with job boards as an additional source of quests or as an aid to find certain quests, like in the Witcher games, but I don't want all quests to be obtainable this way or job boards to be the sole source of quests.

Not sure how I feel about shops, it really depends on the game. I'm not the kind of player who enjoys item management much, so often purchasing and selling stuff is nothing but a chore to me and specialised shops that each carry a certain type of item often introduce an additional overhead to an already tedious procedure. It really depends on how the item management works in a game and how often you have to visit shops. If it's once in a blue moon that I want to stock up on consumables and check out what new items are available, okay, but if a game has me constantly visit a town and stock up on stuff, the last thing I want is to have to spend several minutes running from shop to shop, just to get everything I need.

Incidentally I'm playing Yakuza 0 currently now and that game has reminded me how much I love games where side quests are rewards for exploration. There side quests wait around every corner and new ones tend to unexpectedly pop up in locations you've already been to before. If there's an obscure corner, like a dark alley, there's a good chance that you will get approached by some NPC in there. This is why walking from quest marker to quest marker never feels like a chore to me here. The sole fact that I might run into something cool anywhere I go makes the game just superbly enjoyable to me. It also helps that the world isn't particularly big and meaningful content is densely placed.

And shops also work in a pretty cool manner. They are partially specialised, you will get basic healing items and whatnot in almost every shop but some or most shops also carry certain items you won't find elsewhere. So almost any shop will do if I need to stock up on healing items but I might find something interesting if I check out a random one. Really love this.

Depends. Standard equipment should be readily available, for example in several shops around a market square. But for that Infinity+1 sword of Badassery it totally makes sense to travel to the end of the world to that one master-smith who can actually forge it. I wouldn't expect to find a Masamune in any convenience store, after all.

The shop would only need a good sorting system and/or tabs for different types of items.

A little adendum: I'm not suggesting that everything be available in the same shop, just gear, I think skill trainers, temples for healing etc should be their own buiding/NPC.

In aRPGs, that is completely fine. Like every city/settlement having a general trader that has everything and usually randomly generated inventory. It cuts down on the downtime.

In standard RPGs, that would feel weird. I liked in Dragon Age Origins for example that every trader had a one or two extremely powerful and pricey items you had to save up for a long time. So you just write down/remember where the trader was and go there when you have enough money. That makes it feel special. Having to travel to the other side of the map just to visit a trader deep in the Dwarven underground kingdom to buy that one item you have been eyeing since the start of the game. Or traveling to a specific merchant that has infinite supply of empty bottles or Lyrium Dust. If every trader had the same inventory, it would seriously detract from the experience.

Final Fantasy doesn't have blue magic; there's only black and white (which red mages being able to use both, but lacking certain spells (like the party heal spells)).

Final Fantasy 5, on the other hand, does have blue magic; in fact, one nice thing about FF5 is that no blue magic is permanently missable. Given a party of level 99 characters that is at the end of the game, having cleared every event, but yet knows new blue magic, it is possible to learn every blue magic spell in the game. (You might need to be creative for some spells, like the ones based off level divisibility, but it is still possible.)

Unfortunately, FF5 does have a few missibles, including a few summons and bard songs, so it's not perfect, but it is at least better than FF7 (or FF6, for that matter) when it comes to blue magic.

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You're misusing the terms here. What is commonly called an ARPG generally refers to action games with RPG elements; it has nothing to do with whether the game is focused on loot. I could cite games like the Bard's Tale series (espeically 1 and 2), Wizardry 1, and the Etrian Odyssey series, which are turn based and focus on loot; on the other hand, I could refer to a game like Ys 6: The Ark of Naphistim, which is what many call an ARPG but does not have a focus on loot.

(For whatever reason, people seem to be making this mistake a lot lately.)

If we're talking about a shop in the Dark World, in the very last town that you will visit over the course of the normal game, I don't want to see mundane equipment in such a shop; all the plain Broadswords and Plate Mail that the shop might have is useless junk at that point in the game, and I would rather not wade through it at that point. Give me the Holy Avengers and Mystic Plate of Regeneration, and perhaps Wands of Resurrection, and other powerful magical items in such late game shops (and price them appropriately, of course).

Well, I know I could be using the term Diablo-like/clone or whatever but I just don't want to use the term because it makes Diablo seem like some holy grail.

It's just that, as far as loot is concerned, Diablo has more in common with Wizardry (which is turn-based) than with Ys (which is not).

Avernum does a mix of both, but the nice thing is, the NPCs don't go gallivanting around and you get a map for free,

So it balances easily, especially later in the game when the portal network opens to the player.

Depends on the game honestly. In some, exploration is part of the core gameplay (and therefore the fun) in some it's not. It's for sure a genre where developers tend to stick to a lot of conventions without pondering if they actually fit their game.

I was under the impression those types of games are called Dungeon Crawler. When the main focus is quite literally crawling through dungeons, fighting, looting, usually with very little focus on other gameplay elements & plot.