I am a huge lover of PSO 1 - especially supporting as Force, and still pop on ephinea psobb sometimes to play with my fomar/fomarl. I've mostly avoided pso2 since I didn't wish to take the prospect of getting a surprising IP ban for enjoying it outside of Japan, and a number of things weren't translated, making it not really accessible for mepersonally. I mostly assumed it was not ever coming into the us and did not actually look too much into it. I did play PSU if it was published and was fairly disappointed with it - if I recall right, PSU largely dropped craftable things that took a lot of the hype from those nice red drops, and that I did not believe the combat/music/environments did PSO justice.
I've seen lots of hype for pso2, also since it is coming out soon, I wished to know the general view. How is the teamwork/character progression in that game, and how satisfying is the battle? My absolute favourite thing in PSO was challenge mode and running through maps as a low level with just what you discover while solving puzzles was great - does pso2 have anything like this?
There's a lot more fluid combat and high quality of life for sure in PSO2. I am not positive whether that the OST in PSO2 is better than PSO1 though that is an opinion. I would play PSO2 when it releases. It's really such a chill game. I am not generally a fan of the reception looter shot genre but some thing about PSO2 just really clicked with me when I played it. It has just the right dash of"12 year-old syndrome" trendy in addition to character customization which blows games 10 years its mature out of their water, incredible build diversity, a glut of material and most importantly, all-class leveling onto the one character. It isn't ideal and has some issues, but it is easily up there as one of the most pleasant free-to-play experiences you are ever going to get, period.
Extended time (5+ years) PSO2 JP player here and I'll try to answer a few of your questions, as well as provide my personal comment on PSO2. PSO2 is pretty fun if you should play it casually. It has a huge amount of fashion (the true end match ), that is pretty accesible to F2P players, at least judging from JP server market costs; As well as very liquid battle, although that depends on the class. New"successor" courses (will) perform far better than old ones, but with the number of courses in PSO2, I'm sure you'll be able to find one that suits you.
Regarding combat: you've got some classes that provide some utility in quests, like Techter, but in general each class is DPS-focused and there's little to no cases when you require cooperation like in other MMORPGs. And it'll be even worse after Advanced/Successor courses launch. Challenge manner does exist (though I am not certain how it compares to PSO one), but it is significantly abandoned in JP server, and I doubt the situation is going to be different in NA, at least not for long.
More information about PSO2 in https://www.pso2ah.com/