I haven't used RPGMaker for many many years, but if my memory serves "Halt all movement" was used to *wait* for all move events to finish, and it was pretty useful (or am I mixing it up with some other command?)

Nah man, this is Proceed with Movement, which is immensely handy! Halt All Movement is pretty useless tho.

The commands are clearly there for creating Dragon Quest traditional JRPGs. Trade two event locations is probably the most useful one there, I can see it being used for some great puzzles. Simulated enemy attack doesn't work in the DBS, and anybody who uses a CBS wouldn't want to use the algorithm from the engine. So yeah, that one is pretty useless. The encounter rate and changing things like the hero name are clearly for games focused on class statistics. But I'm not certain how well they work.

Oh yeah, proceed with movement is very good for cutscenes.

When I actually used it I always used Change Hero Name to change it from "???GENERICMYSTERIOUSGUI" to their actual name after plot devices. I fail to see how that is so useless?