It sounds like you have two problems: (1) your game with 6-8 players has slow combats unless you use a small number of monsters, and (2) if you use a small number of monsters, your crowd-controllers can shut the encounter down.
The first problem is easier to fix:
- Use a larger number of monsters, but make most of them them identical so that you can run turns for them quickly. Move them all on the same initiative. "Okay, these three orcs are attacking you. Each of them makes one attack, with an attack bonus of +4... (rolls) they hit AC 11, 15, and 17. How many hits? Okay, take... (rolls) 12 damage." Optionally include one or two bigger monsters so that your crowd-controllers have something awesome to do.
- Consider splitting your game into two smaller games. You can start slowly -- have occasional "side missions" which don't involve the whole group. These will be easier to schedule: choose the time and place that work best for you, and see if around half of your players are able to be there. If that seems to work, you can have more and more side missions, and save the "full group" scenarios for boss fights and special occasions. In the extreme case, this turns into a West Marches scenario.
For the second problem: remember that D&D 5e is balanced around having a lot of encounters per day. Are you doing that? If you're only giving them one big fight in between rests, your characters with daily powers will be much more powerful than the designers intended, because they can use all their dailies in that encounter. Those crowd-control abilities: are they daily powers?
If you suddenly change your game from one fight per day to three or four, make sure to telegraph that in advance so your casters don't waste all their spells on the first fight.
One final note: it can be dangerous to have battles with a small number of active monsters. What tends to happen is each monster stands in one place and focuses all its damage on one player character. This is really bad for that player character, and it's sort of boring for all the other characters who never get attacked. One solution I've used for this problem is, when I have an encounter with just one monster, I make sure that all its attacks are area-effect attacks, so that it spreads out the damage more evenly. This involves a lot of inventing homebrew monsters, though, so it may not be best for every group.
Remove or minimize combat in your games
First, the low-hanging fruit. If you don't enjoy combat, then don't include combat in your design. There is nobody forcing your hand as the DM to include it. Its presence in your game is solely up to you, and since nobody likes it anyway, don't have it.
Put only thoughtful, reasonable NPCs in your games
In real life, there is a reason that we don't engage in combat with our boss to get a raise, or attempt to murder anyone we think is trying to stop us from achieving our goals. Violence creates a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. As a combatant, you risk physical harm, reputational damage, and even death.
This means your boss NPCs will be more intelligent and less likely to scorching ray someone, but rather they will be more open to negotiation and intrigue. After all, they probably got to their current position by being smart about it. Your guards (which you most likely only put there to obstruct the player's goals via combat) have extensive alarms and communication systems such that, if even one guard spots you, everyone knows there's an intruder -- which is a powerful deterrent for any possible intruder, including the party. Your mad dogs, wild animals, and random monsters will have a sense of self-preservation, and they will try to run away from the fight as soon as they feel the fight slipping outside of their favor.
This either removes combat from your games entirely, or cuts them down to such an extent that the only combats you will have are the combats that make narrative sense to have.
If you must have combat, only include it when the narrative demands it
Don't throw in fights for fights' sake, because as you established, nobody in your table likes that. Include it as the climax to a story arc, or the final battle before the completion of a subplot. This will make your combat narratively significant. There is no feeling of "get on with it already" here, because the success or failure of the party will swing the story in vastly different directions.
In a game I'm running, I presented the players with a choice. The party agreed to not attack a second party (of NPCs) or try to steal from them, even though the second party had valuable loot the first party needed, on the basis that one of the players was brothers in bond with one of the NPCs from the second party. If the players don't get the loot, though, there will be horrible consequences. But as the pressure mounted, their choice was this: does the player betray his brother, or does he keep his pact and damn his party?
They did eventually decide to betray the NPCs, which led to combat. This combat was significant: if they killed the NPCs, they could find the valuable loot they were after, but the player would have killed a brother. If they failed to kill the NPCs, then the bond of trust between the player's character and his brother will be permanently broken, plus they don't get the loot they need. It is a dilemma. Both choices are awful, but which one will they take? How can they get out of it?
This is the first combat I ran for the campaign, and it as the 6th or 7th session. I absolutely cut out all the unnecessary fighting. There is no dungeon crawl feel. What is left is an intense sense of tension and intrigue.
When you do have combat, minimize the total time in play
There are a lot of variants and techniques you can use to ensure you spend as little time in combat as possible. The bottom line is, you must streamline your combat.
You already know this combat will be narratively significant, so prepare all the cheat sheets beforehand: rules you think will be important to reference.
Prepare index cards for each monster, pre-roll their initiative, attacks, and damage rolls. When it's their turn, quickly describe what they do (which you'd already decided before combat began) and throw the spotlight back to the players.
Use Variant rules that will shorten combat
The DMG provides several options that effectively reduce the HP of all the combatants.
Massive Damage (DMG 273): When a creature suffers damage in one attack equal to or greater than half its maximum hitpoints, it experiences a system shock. The effects range from not being able to use reactions, to instantly dropping to 0 HP. This means you only have to deal half a creature's HP to put it down, instead of its full HP.
Morale (DMG 273): When creatures are surprised, reduced to half its HP for the first time in battle or has no way of harming the opposite side (when alone), or when the leader's HP drops to 0 or the group has shrunk to half its size while the opposition hasn't suffered losses; then creatures may flee if they fail a DC 10 Wisdom save. A fleeing creature is out of the battle, so for the purposes of combat, their HP has already effectively dropped to 0.
Side Initiative (DMG 270): Instead of each PC rolling initiative, the group makes one check and performs all their turns simultaneously, allowing them to gang up on any one creature and potentially end combat very quickly.
On actually reducing the importance of HP
Introduce save-or-suck mechanics
Working with the system as designed, you can introduce a lot of save-or-suck spells to your player characters and your NPCs: forcecage, wall of force, banishment, polymorph, phantasmal force, etc. These are spells or effects where, if you succumb to them, it doesn't matter what your HP is, as it brings you out of the fight immediately.
If both sides of combat employ save-or-suck tactics, then combat is a game of rocket tag. This isn't desirable under normal game requirements, because combat becomes too short and is usually determined by who goes first rather than using smart tactics. However, I do think your table could do away with combat tactics (and combat in general), so this may be worth a try.
Reduce HP drastically in exchange for a very high AC
In designing monsters, there is a trade-off between AC and HP. Higher HP creatures can have a low AC because they can take strong hits and survive. I recommend that you adjust your encounters and reduce the HP of your monsters, but increase their AC drastically in exchange. The goal is to have a fragile NPC which can be killed in one or two hits, thereby devaluing their HP, but who is very hard to hit in the first place. This still has the effect of presenting a very hard encounter, and it forces players to adapt and strategize once they know any one hit will kill their opponents, if only those hits land.
Introduce dynamic and interesting terrain
You can get away with having high HP opponents if you also put a pool of lava that the players can push them onto, or a high pit they can fall off of. Put in a large body of water that someone can drown in (suffocating brings you down to 0 HP instantly). Essentially, design the encounter to have ways to instantly defeat the opponents by using the terrain creatively.
Take note that the opponents should also be able to use the environment to their advantage. Just as the PCs can push their enemies into lava, the PCs themselves can be pushed into the lava. This creates the sense of a high stakes arms race: I have to do it to them before they do it to me. That creates tension, and tension is immersive and interesting.
Don't make it about murder
A thing that happens when you introduce HP is, it creates this idea that you have to reduce someone's HP to 0 to "win." But in reality, you rarely win encounters by smacking someone until they agree with you. Realign your campaign so that it isn't about reducing a monster to 0 HP in combat. This removes the meaning from HP entirely, allowing you to reduce its significance to 0 without replacing it for a houseruled mechanic.
For example: the players have two minutes to reach the end of the hall, insert the MacGuffin into the place it goes, and stop the villain from completing his plans. But, standing in their way and blocking their path is a really high HP goon who cannot possibly defeat the party, but is resilient enough to take their attacks and hold the party off for the next two minutes. Reducing this creature's HP to 0 will actually be according to the villain's plans, because the party will have wasted all that time. This combat doubles as a puzzle: how do the player characters defeat this goon without bringing him to 0 HP?
Another example: the party's "opponent" turns out to be an innocent woman who is trying to protect her children. The woman has been possessed by a devil, and if left alone, she will turn into the devil's vessel and lose her mind, potentially killing a lot of people, and definitely killing her own children. However, right now, she is still herself, and she is afraid, thinking the party is out to kill her and take her kids away. The crux: they party has been tasked with killing her and bringing her kids to the government. She is a commoner with 4 HP and 10 AC: any one hit will kill her. But will the the party do it? This "combat" doubles as a moral dilemma, and it becomes a vehicle to explore and develop the player characters' personalities and beliefs.
Best Answer
Don't.
The antagonists want the PCs alive--that's already been established. So let the players take a few runs at the guards; undoubtedly one time they will come up with something clever or amazing, which'll work. Let your players solve the problem for you.
(In addition, your players aren't actually that diminished by their lack of equipment. I cover that in "part two" of this answer.)
Why do we balance encounters?
Generally, we don't want to TPK unless the players ignore lots of warning signs and do actively stupid things. And we don't like a deus ex machina where the wires and ropes and assistants turning the crank are all visible. So we worry about balancing the encounter, making sure it's a challenge while ensuring player victory, and the game becomes about how few of their resources they can burn during any given encounter.
None of this applies here. Your players have a limited set of resources, but that's not going to stop them from making a big stink: the druid can still wildshape, the barbarian and paladin can still do tremendous--compared to an NPC's life--damage bare-handed (Divine Smiting left and right, literally!), but your fighter or rogue might be relegated to Helping the wizard make creative use of the one spell they have without material components.
Remember, the party need not kill too many NPCs before they'll run for help, allowing you to transition to a chase/escape scene. I mean, how many redshirts are really willing to die for their cause? Usually they don't have a choice, because we back them into a corner or gun them down from behind for XP. But this time the NPCs have plenty of 'outs,' and the players should be happy to let them use one.
And maybe the party fails, only to try again another day. It may feel a little like Groundhog Day. But that's no insult--that's an awesome movie.
Your party:
You've added a bit of detail, so I will too =)
The tl;dr is your party is still well-equipped, even when unequipped, to handle themselves. They're down some ranged attacks, maybe. They're down a little damage output from the martials. They're down some AC, again mostly on the martial side, but you've got plenty of healing.
There's plenty of room for creative combat solutions with what's left:
Your cleric has access to Blindness/Deafness, Burning Hands, Calm Emotions, Charm Person, Chill Touch, Command, Cure Wounds, Detect Evil and Good, Detect Magic, Disguise Self, Divine Favor, Druidcraft, Faerie Fire, Find Traps, Fog Cloud, Guidance, Guiding Bolt, Healing Word, Inflict Wounds, Lesser Restoration, Magic Weapon, Mirror Image, Poison Spray, Prayer of Healing, Produce Flame, Protection from Poison, Purify Food and Drink, Ray of Enfeeblement, Ray of Sickness, Sacred Flame, Scorching Ray, Silence, Spare the Dying, Speak with Animals, Spiritual Weapon, Thaumaturgy, Thunderwave, Zone of Truth, all without material components. (Some might depend on domain.)
Your druid has access to Beast Sense, Blur, Charm Person, Cure Wounds, Detect Magic, Druidcraft, Entangle, Faerie Fire, Find Traps, Fog Cloud, Guidance, Healing Word, Lesser Restoration, Mirror Image, Misty Step, Poison Spray, Produce Flame, Protection from Poison, Purify Food and Drink, Silence, Speak with Animals, Thunderwave, all without material components. (Some may depend on circle/land.) And they can turn into a bear! Or a mouse. Either might be very useful.
Your fighter can punch a dude and still do 1+STR damage, and can grab any ol' thing lying around to do an expected 2.5+STR damage. Assuming +3 STR that's still ~2/3 the damage you might have been doing be-weaponed. (That assumes same likelihood to hit--I like to give my fighters proficiency with almost any improvised weapon: the defining characteristic of the class is training with all types of weapons and combat, so I give them the most latitude with improvised weapons, too.)
Or they can Help their allies, or grapple, or shove... maybe this is the fight where the fighter isn't the character to take the prize for damage dealt. That's cool, too.
Your paladin has access to Branding Smite, Command, Compelled Duel, Crown of Madness, Cure Wounds, Detect Evil and Good, Detect Magic, Divine Favor, Ensnaring Strike, Find Steed, Hellish Rebuke, Heroism, Hunter's Mark, Inflict Wounds, Lesser Restoration, Magic Weapon, Misty Step, Protection from Poison, Purify Food and Drink, Searing Smite, Speak with Animals, Thunderous Smite, Wrathful Smite, Zone of Truth, all without material components. (Some may depend on Oath.) But you're probably better off spending those spell slots Divine Smiting with your fists.
Your ranger has access to Beast Sense, Cure Wounds, Detect Magic, Ensnaring Strike, Find Traps, Fog Cloud, Hail of Thorns, Hunter's Mark, Lesser Restoration, Protection from Poison, Silence, Speak with Animals, all without material components. Actually, those don't look terribly useful. But you're a ranger, so you should be used to that.
Your sorcerer has access to Acid Splash, Alter Self, Blade Ward, Blindness/Deafness, Blur, Burning Hands, Charm Person, Chill Touch, Crown of Madness, Detect Magic, Disguise Self, Expeditious Retreat, Fire Bolt, Fog Cloud, Knock, Mage Hand, Magic Missile, Mirror Image, Misty Step, Poison Spray, Prestidigitation, Ray of Frost, Ray of Sickness, Scorching Ray, Shield, Shocking Grasp, Thunderwave, True Strike, all without material components.
If your party can't get out of jail with all of this at their disposal, let them sit another day and think about what they've done.