In my personal opinion, it has always seemed to me that the problem people had with ATB wasn't so much ATB itself, but that often, random encounters came with ATB. And people these days seem to see random encounters as the worst crime that a human being can ever comit. Though that's of course not true. Just look at Chrono Trigger.

I always wondered why none of the 'modern' FF games did that when trying to do away with random encounters. In Chrono Trigger, you see an enemy, you run up to it, your characters spread out and ATB starts. No screen transition at all. Why hasn't a single FF done this yet? It's probably the best system that does away with RE and keeps ATB I've seen so far. And I'm sure that if it was done like this, people and reviewers wouldn't make that much of a deal of ATB either, or see it as outdated.