I bring up the weapon system cause you said XIII and most challenging in the same breadth and I simply stated why you are wrong.
While I agree VIII's overall system is broken, let me clarify that I was specifically talking about the fact enemies level with the party, I didn't mean to sound like I was suggesting the Junction System, but games like FFTactics have shown that a good way to maintain balance is to let the enemies level with the party so the player doesn't dominate. I just felt that VIII and FFT didn't go far enough with making the enemies stronger and that statistical upgrades is mostly lazy design when you could be changing the enemies attack scripts and adding counters to enemies as they get stronger.