If those are the only times you died in the game then you must be freakishly good. Firstly, you can not be strong enough to take on a boss fight due to dodging too many battles. Secondly, you can use the wrong set of characters, meaning you miss out on vital options that other characters provide. Thirdly, despite how automated you can make the game, you are still in control of what your character is doing and there is every possibility that you can wind up "doing it wrong". And, of course, you can have the wrong paradigm setup or not switch in time or... well, there are a lot of things that can go wrong, let's face it. If you felt the battles were playing themselves then... well, with the amount of times I died in that game, you are a FF God amongst FF men. Some of those battles were incredibly frustrating for me.

I agree with you that graphics do not make immersion, but I hope you can also see where I'm coming from when I can say exactly the same thing about old-school graphics not making gameplay and story. And when I say that, I mean in relation to the original purpose of this thread: 16 bit graphics will not suddenly make amazing gameplay and incredible story. So for me, petitioning for a thing in the hope that somehow a 16 bit game will fix Square Enix's creativity is silly.

Whatever SE can do with 16 bit graphics, I am confident they can do the same in a 3D environment. Maybe it will take longer and maybe it will be heavier in the amount of disks it will take up or something, but 16-bit is not the answer to the real problems at SE. One of the biggest problems they have lately is their inability to make games that appeal to the masses. If that is the case, how will 16-bit appeal to the masses? Put simply, it won't.