Unfortunately, I did not play nearly as much Persona today as I had planned on.  A friend from my climbing gym called to see if I wanted to go rock climb outside, and me being a sucker for such pursuits, went outside and neglected my gaming.  That said, I did still get a few hours of controller time in this evening, and the thing I want to address today is the battle system in P4.  The major difference between Personas 3 and 4 in this regard is the ability to issue individual commands to your party members, instead of simply setting them to one of a few predefined activity classes.  The Persona 4 battle system is much more efficient, and inherently less frustrating than 3 was.  However, this is balanced a bit by the difficulty I mentioned in previous entries.
 
Gone in P4 is the fatigue condition that would set in after a long dungeon crawl in P3.  At this point, you're only limited by the items and skills you can use to recover HP and SP.  In addition, you have the fox in the TV world lobby to provide some restoration as well.  
 
I'm of the opinion that the P4 battle system streamlines the process a bit, and makes the dungeon crawling parts of the game feel a bit less clunky than its predecessor.  Now if only P4 had P3s story ... though I suppose that's what Atlus delivered in P3 Portable if what I've heard is correct.  Oh well.  Onward and upward.