I feel your pain.
I've given up on most of the Final Fantasy games I own because the sheer quantity of random battles just p!sses me off and takes the fun out of the game.
Take Final Fantasy IX for example. Fun game, excellent storyline. But the random battles are just far too frequent, and they occur
absolutely everywhere! There's nothing more frustrating than trying to explore a location, or trying to solve an area's puzzle, whilst having to fight a gang of three stone golems with 16882 HP every five steps. Plus two of the best battle characters were absent for nearly the entirety of disk 2, which leaves you stuck with the rather lame main guy and three f*cking mages (only one of which was a Black one) as the party for a large part of the game. I've now pretty much stopped playing it because it got on my nerves too much.
I also had the same problem with IV and VI - I just got fed up.
VII has never been a problem because the encounters seem less frequent than the other games and pretty much all the playable characters are uber and the regular enemies quite weak, so it's pretty cut and dry to just blitz through them, although maybe me knowing the game so well has something to do with it. And then there's VIII, which is even better - enemies and bosses match your party's average level, so levelling up is unnecessary, plus you gain the Encounter Half ability pretty damn early (which reduces random battles closer to 75% than 50%), and Encounter None early in disk 2 if you want the Diablo GF to learn them both off the bat. VIII is wonderful.
Save points are also a nuisance at times. I get the point of making things tougher but I've always felt that RPGs really need difficulty settings (which could alter number of save points depending on the difficulty), because the first time you play through the game you just want to know the damn story and get used to playing the game's mechanics. I remember a game called Parasite Eve II, which was a weird mesh of Survival Horror and RPG and was made by Square, that had terribly placed save points (usually nowhere near bosses, so if you died you'd often have to track through 15 minutes of gameplay to re-battle said boss...yeah, this is another game I got sick of).
I feel a lack of difficulty levels really hits RPGs hard. An 'easy' difficulty, with less random encounters and more save points would be great, as it would give a first time player a chance to enjoy the story all the way through and get used to the game's mechanics. If they want to play again with a bigger challenge, more difficulty levels await.
I think what helps Pokemon's case in the RPG regards is that neither of these issues are present. In terms of random encounters, you only encounter wild pokemon in grass, which can often be avoided, and by the time you get to awful areas like caves and the open sea where pokemon appear all the time every three steps, you'll be able to buy Repels to stop them appearing if you so wish it. As for saving, well, you can save
wherever and whenever you like.
.