TLDR; Is 2D Isometric sprite creation/animation more work than it's worth for someone noob enough to have to ask?
A little background
My buddy and I recently decided to try our hand at a game like Final Fantasy Tactics / Fell Seal. We're huge FFT fans and seeing the greatness of what Fell Seal has brought sparked us to try to make a very 'watered-down' Tactical RPG (Battle system, classes and a story worthy for runner up on the AVN awards). Personal/friend & family, not trying to sell this one. 2 man team where he is in charge of concept and creativity and I am handling all the programming and art work (development and finding assets). I've searched pretty extensively for pre-made 2D ISO sprites or commissioning the work and the results come up pretty dry. Neither of us have developed a game but I am experienced in non-gaming programming and graphic design.
So my question.
With our little resources, what is a good method of developing our characters? I've searched for asset packs and for answers on methods of creating my own and it seems like everyone avoids 2D isometric sprites like the plague. Considering I can't wrap my head around anything other than drawing each sprite in each pose x however many frames I need to animate (barf) or trying to model in 3D ( which I havent done since autocad in 2007) and rendering the same poses. I have to imagine there's some what of a more efficient way or holy crap is the Fell Seal artist even more talented than whats already been made clear. Seems like that would be thousands of PNGs.
I'm pretty settled on Godot for our game engine. It feels natural to me and Unity just doesn't ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . I'm good with Illustrator and Photoshop but NOT pixel art. My drawing skills are more technical than creative. I can do line art off references/sketches really well, for example. Programming wise I've worked with a few generics (Batch/Shell scripts, VBScript, HTML/XML/JSON and I work in PL/SQL Daily).
Thanks in advance!