I think you'll find you don't run/dash often at all. Most attacks keep Neku right with the enemies, and the others are all ranged.
Dashing is only used for dodging attacking, and sometimes an enemy is on the opposite side of the field so you have to jump over there (e.g. you just finished killing a group of three on the far left, and one is hiding off-screen on the far right).
Also, there's a pin that turns Neku into a little ball of light when dashing, which gets rid of the delay before he sprints... although I find that pin to be rather unnecessary, it does make it feel smoother.
I think the combat controls are fantastic. They take a while to master, but once mastered are the best of any DS game I've played. My only minor gripe with controls is that some actions overlap. The pin class/grade system tries to make it so you can't use overlapping pins, but since there are a limited number of stylus actions and 300 pins, sometimes you end up with multiple pins that require the same action to activate.
This past week I've been busy with school, so I stopped advancing the story and have just been playing 24 battles a day while eating, to boost attack. It's sooo much easier now. The past 5 days has boosted my attack 20+ on both Neku and Joshua, and now Hard is about as challenging as Normal was. Syncing does 600 damage, when before it did 180.