I personally find physical attacks to be just as viable but there's probably more ways to do more damage with magic; the trick is to try and equip armour, accessory, and Materia to push their Strength and Luck stats. I think I adjusted things like enemy defences and spell strengths for the late-game a little to try and counteract it a bit.
These are the two derivatives from the full mod:
*) Combat Only: Only the battle balancing is included (enemy strength & character equipment, spells, etc.), the field scripting, story text, item placement, events, etc. are all vanilla. Any new enemies added for NT are also removed. For people who want the combat rebalancing stuff but not the other stuff I've added. 2.0 has this variant. It can be used as a compatibility option with mods that adjust field scripting, though it may not be 100%.
*) Vanilla Combat: The opposite of the above; all the new field scripting, events, item placements, etc. for NT are included but all of the enemy encounters and character equipment, etc. is vanilla. For people who want the extra stuff, but not the battle rebalancing. 2.0 doesn't have this variant (the 1.5 build has it), but I'm planning to make this for 2.0 soon.
As for item placements & enemy skills, they're mostly the same with a few exceptions; Matra Magic is still learned from Custom Sweepers outside Midgar, for instance. There's a download I have on this thread that contains documentation which lists where everything is (or at least, one location for it) if that helps.
The 30/60 FPS mod should work with Combat Only; enable both the 60fps IRO and the 60FPS NT IRO like you would for the full mod.
The IRO text on the options isn't super clear, but I did an update to NT CO today that hopefully makes it a little clearer; it's just an internal thing so that it applies the files, and should be left On.
