Magical girl originated as a genre geared towards primary school to middle school aged girls, with bones thrown to other audiences, such as surprisingly intense plotlines or fluid, dynamic action sequences.

Precure is basically this to the core. The target audience is younger girls, but it also has a lot of dramatic moments(which really is good for both the target audience and the periphery demographics) and some pretty over the top action sequences.

Dramatic absolutely does not mean dark and it's a fallacy to think so.

Nanoha's darker moments aren't too horribly out of line and facilitate the story's triumphant moments. Overall it's not a dark series at all.

You can have dramatic moments and dark moments without making the entire series dark. Again, Precure actually does this even, though to a lesser extent(also depending on the season since they vary pretty greatly).

Like I said, I like Nanoha and Symphogear a lot. I'd like an RP that has a serious plot and antagonists, but isn't something overly-dark.

And nothing can really change my mind on Raising Project. I love the designs and the characters themselves seemed creative and fun but I feel like that makes the series even more wasteful.