Far too tired to do anything more than skim the thread at this point, but I'm just going to say that the Square in charge of producing FF games now pretty much isn't at all the Square that was producing FF games twenty years ago. I don't think any of the original content creators are even still working at the company. So it's not all that surprising that the content they're creating would be different... and honestly, most of it doesn't really interest me that much. Maybe I'll play FFXII at some point, but for now I'm honestly more interested in the remakes of old games than the new games. Then again, I have... odd taste.

Basically, I agree with Kishi and what I've read of Wolf Kanno's posts.