I'm afraid I'm going to have to dissapoint you, basically no tutorial is present as far as I can remember it...
You'll learn by advancing trough the game though, I did at least.

The cycling trough cards does take a while, I'll give you that, however, as you might (or might not) know you can put 1 shortcut, so when you press the D-Pad, it automatically goes to your shortcutted card, like say you shortcut all your 0 cards and put your healing cards after that, then you can easily break their cards and easily heal up aswell.

I'm used to heated battles aswell, I love me some Kingdom Hearts, especially the post-battle bosses, they're just plain awesome!

There are certain decks or "Sleight decks" that you can make to make the game a breeze.

I usually carry around 2 decks, a boss and a normal enemy deck, the normal enemy deck you'll be using the most, best is to get Sleights in there that damage everyone around you, like Magnet Spiral and later on Megaflare/Holy/etc...

The boss deck needs more refinement, but the best Sleight is Lethal Frame (Stop card + 2 x attack cards), it stops the enemy (or boss in this case) dead in it's tracks while you wail away, this combined with some good enemy cards should make you nearly an unstoppable force.

My advice to you is always have a card ready and let the enemy attack first, that way you can break their card if yours has a higher number and they will be stunned for a fraction of a second, giving you some room for a free attack.

So what to do at the start when you don't have these Sleights? Just fill your deck with the strongest attack cards that you have and a few items/Cure cards, also have some 0 cards at the back of your deck, these break any number when played after the CPU used it's card/combo.
Everytime you level and you can pick Sleight, go for it! Otherwise I pretty much divided HP and CP evenly with a little more into HP.

Am I still making sense? lol

Well...In my opinion: KH: Re:COM is the weakest out of all the KH, the story in itself is "ok" and the card system is acceptable once you get the hang of it, but the endless making of rooms and grinding/farming for levels is very boring.

I would say no then, I mean, if you are already annoyed at the start of the game, gameplay wise, it's not getting better!

Platinum on this title is a real pain in the *** seeing as difficulty doesn't stack...