There is more than 1 kind of strength. Honey is the one winning battles for her? If she hadn't won Honey over, the aliens would already be ruling the Earth. That's real power.
So she should just be a motivational speaker, then. She seems be better at that then fighting. If it wasn't for Honey, she would've been defeated and dead more than three times now. And yes... Rapid only wins because of Honey.
You do realize that this series is chock-full of sentai references? Heroes on your daily/weekly sentai shows never go full ape-shit on people until the last five minutes of an episode. Your average 5-10 year old kid isn't going to be able to comprehend complex plotlines (or at least, studios don't think they'll be able to comprehend them), so it's a lot easier to put in villains with an interesting design each week and run the same basic fight structure all over again. Sentai makes a shit-ton of money from merchandising, so the focus is much more on equipment than it is on moves- rather than having a whole set of skills or choreographing fights with unnamed moves, these shows just feature certain devices, weapons or powers that get activated at a certain point into the fight and wipe the enemy out in one hit. The reason you have big casts is, as mentioned by posters above, to instill in kids a respect for the power of friendship and cooperation, and also to create a larger cast of merchandisable characters with their own, individual merchandisable equipment.
This isn't just sentai-exclusive either- if you've ever watched a magical girl show aimed at kids, like Precure, or even pro-wrestling (John Cena's Five moves of Doom), you'll see a very set pattern to the fights. People want to see patterns, to predict the flow of fights, to boo when the heroes get beaten down and cheer when they pop back up, to sing along with heroic themes when they blast out, to say the invocation lines they've heard a hundred times before. People don't watch sentai to be shocked or surprised- they know it's predictable, and focus more on the emotional content (which, in this case, is our leading pair of lesbians).
The point is, if you're going into this series with huge expectations of thrilling fights, you're not going to be satisfied. Sometime is pretty committed to following a sentai-based story structure and using the tropes and conventions of the medium, which is the entire appeal. Audiences in Japan (for whom the story is intended), will probably lap it up and cheer every time they see a reference to something they recognize from their childhood. You seem to want the series to be something that it isn't, and although half-a-dozen people have explained this to you in various ways, the argument's still ongoing.
Basically, this is never going to turn into some kind of shonen battle series, because it was never supposed to be one in the first place. Your problems and complaints with the way fights are portrayed will never be addressed, because for the author, they aren't issues, but selling points. What you're doing here is the equivalent of criticizing a boxing match for not featuring piledrivers, or saying that a magical girl series is shit because none of the girls come up with 500 IQ plans to ambush the monsters that they know are going to show up each week. You're missing the point, and therefore, this argument has become pointless.
As a solution, you could either understand and accept what this series is trying to do with its fights and keep reading it for the yuri, or just drop it altogether if it isn't to your liking. This isn't like some arc or plot development that'll come and go- it's a vital part of the series' identity. Otherwise, this'll just turn into another one of those Futaribeya-type threads where one person criticizes the series for being something that it doesn't want to be and never promised to be, while others strive valiantly to explain an entire genre as good or bad storytelling.
Holy crap. You wrote so much just to completely and utterly miss my point. I don't have a problem with the "complexity" of the fights or the lack of it. The action scenes are quite good. I have a problem with how completely inept the MC is. So what? A sentai or whatever genre must have a weak MC? That's inane. I don't have a problem with an entire genre. I never said that. I have a problem with this one and it's proagonist. I can't take her serious.
Also, this is not an inate problem of Sentais. There are several Sentai MC who are strong on their own. Vivid and Nanoha - the apex of friendship crap - is a good example of it. You also used John Cena's example (weird, but okay). He rarely loses fairly. And it's an extremely simple storyline with a "MC" who is legitimatly strong and a rather good balance between losses and wins.
You read too much into it and read it complety wrong... Bringing up a genre I have no problem with. And no work is free from criticism and I should just accept a work because it's yuri? The tag says "action", so I gonna judge it because of the action as well. People give Citrus shit because of the forced drama not because of the yuri in it. I'm not gonna focus on one aspect of a series and ignore the other. They are both part of it.
The manga is trying to send the message of friendship to little kids? Cool. But they can do that without presenting a hero so damn weak. There are examples of that.
