These are complaints I have never heard before. Were the 10 minute peach interludes really that pace breaking?
I also have never heard anyone having a hard time with the action commands... were you playing on original hardware? You may have had some extra latency if you were playing on an emulator.
Considering how slow Peach walks in the first two games, and how banal the tasks she has to do are...yes, they are quite pace-breaking. With Mario, you've got all of the Mushroom Kingdom or the Rogueport landmass (plus islands) to explore, with partners and combat and other stuff. With Bowser, it's a few short and sweet 2D platformer sequences that don't outstay their welcome, except this time you get to play as
Bowser, with fire breath and all.
With Peach? Slooowly explore her castle whilst avoiding guards (else you get kicked back to her room) in order to find some information; play one quiz one time, or bake a cake once. Yaaay.
Or in TTYD, do a QTE dance sequence or figure out a puzzle to brew an invisibility potion in order to find a Famicom disk that's holding X-Naut info. Also yaaaay.
Not nearly as fun as Mario or Bowser, and she always ends up telling Mario any info obtained anyway - the games could've
easily gotten away with Twink or the Mailbox SP thing telling Mario said information
without the damn Peach segments. They're just boring, repetitive, tedious filler.
Oh, and the Action Commands? I originally played both PM64 and TTYD on my Wii, back in the day, and some commands were damn frustrating - does the Wii count as "original hardware"? Last year or so, I did play TTYD via Dolphin, using my 8bitdo Pro 2 controller, and I still wasn't all that impressed with the action commands - heck, I never did finish that playthrough as I just got
bored of the game, thanks to both the shit Peach sequences and the General White hunt.