Bolivar, I find it hard to disagree with your statements. They're eloquent and you provide good evidence. My only two comments:
While what you've explained shows how FFVII took the series "to the next level", I think that it's up to individual interpretation as to if it was revolutionary or not.
Anything related to graphics has to be taken with a grain of salt when discussing "revolutionary". As myself and Goldenboko have pointed out, you have to be careful that you are not attributing a revolutionary shift in gaming to Square when it should be attributed to Sony. True, the graphics were something we had not seen before, but that is because Sony provided Square with hardware powerful enough to run such a game, not because Square figured out some new algorithms or some such to completely reinvent what was possible on the Super Famicom/Nintendo.
