FFVIII Junctioning Isn't That Complicated, But...

    A common refrain you tend to hear from Final Fantasy VIII's detractors, (a group I certainly belong to, despite my devil's advocacy) is that its reviled Junction System is "too complicated."
That's a bit reductive, and putting stock in stories of forlorn players pushing deep into the game without ever engaging with the system is difficult, given how exhaustively they teach and over-explain it.

You can tell your 18 y/o teacher is into you if she slow blinks

Heck, given her age and status as a pump-fake love interest, I suspect the only narrative reason Quistis Trepe was written as an instructor and not just an upper-classmate boils down to naturalizing her unhinged level of tutorialization on the topic!

Individual spell casts get sucked out of enemies and act like consumables, and Guardian Forces buff you by equipping stacks of spells to your stats; that's about it!
Core player understanding of FFVIII's Junction System wasn't really one of its three fatal design flaws...

Fatal Flaw the First: User Interface

    In much the same way as complexity and depth get twisted up and conflated in game design, when analyzing user interfaces, complexity can become tangled with usability and flow.
Unintuitively, complex menus have a history of drawing players into systems, so the actual problem here isn't an overly crunchy interface so much as the raw number of button presses it takes to accomplish something like attaching Fire to your Strength stat.

The reason to reach for systems that empower the player to break the game like this in the first place is experimentation; it takes just a BIT too much effort to reconfigure between battles, which encourages the player to stick with what's working or follow external guidance rather than play around and discover the many different builds that the system enables.

Reducing the number of player inputs per Junction is a UX flow task beyond the scope of this, but almost any streamlining would make a big difference.

Fatal Flaw the Second: Degenerate Input

    System designers have to constantly be asking themselves what player behaviors their choices reinforce, and whether those behaviors align with overarching goals.

Drawing stacks of magic out of enemies is a cool idea; stealing stuff from monsters is a series mainstay that doesn't get enough reinforcing, but you've got to keep an eye out for first order strategies that represent the shortest distance between player inputs and desired outputs.

Standing around letting monsters beat on you while spamming the same Draw command is best way to stock up on magic, so no matter how boring or unfun it is, your systems can guide players toward having a bad time!

There's lots of different combat puzzles that could spice this up, like the basic Pokémon style "low health capture" pattern. 

Use wind to ground a Thunderbird for Lighting, shut a Malboro's mouth with silence to extract Poison, etc. Basically, reward the player for incapacitating or defeating specific enemies in creative ways!

Fatal Flaw the Third: Output Hoarding

    Narrative Party RPGs already have a well documented range of consumable hoarding problems where players tend to save everything for some theoretical encounter that would require them... which never tends to arrive because their finite nature discourages designers from tuning things to encourage the use of items that players have the power to sell or mis-deploy.

That's a much larger design topic than we can tackle here, but suffice it to say that Junctioning dogpiles onto the hoarding instinct by making your linked stats go down as you cast the spells slotted into them. In practice, the whole system is scaled such that taking a couple of Cure casts off the top doesn't meaningfully reduce your maximum HP, but that doesn't stop the linkage from feeling inelegant and vaguely stressful.

I'll restrain myself for once and wrap this up, as solutions for such a foundational issue threaten to spiral into talk of "Blood Vials versus Estus Flasks" and whether or not usage vs. hoarding is merely a symptom of some amorphous issue with completionism or the availability of save states.

    Junctioning takes an unfair amount of blame for FFVIII being as divisive as it is, distracting from a lot of REAL issues with the world building, writing, and characterization...
    ...but that's definitely a post for another time, like if Squenix decides to remake VIII before doing something with VI...