I got it straight away. And I liked it, or at least aspects of it. There was plenty to hate, however, and that sort of overwhelmed its good aspects.

The pacing absolutely killed the game. Gameplay, story, character development, world building. It doesn't matter, pick an aspect of this game, and you can easily spot just how poorly paced and structured it was.

The world was the weakest aspect. I can't remember ever playing an RPG in which the world felt so empty. There is no life, no people, nothing to do. It just felt barren. Part of building a good story and world is to make you connect with the world and its people, to forge a connection with them that makes you, the player, want to save the world. There is nothing, at all, noteworthy or memorable about this world. There is no reason to get invested, no reason to care.

The level layout massively emphasized this. I know I don't need to harp on the corridors, but I would be remiss not to mention them. The extremely linear and featureless level layout, in a way, completely matched the completely featureless world. Linearity itself is not necessarily a bad thing. FFX was linear, far more so than most of the games in the series. But FFX's hallway was thriving. You couldn't go more than twenty steps in that game without running into an NPC. Whether it was someone just living their own life, or someone on their own quest to help the world in a way that they could, there was so much life in that hallway that it made you forget the linearity and just thrive in the world (plus, although it was essentially just as linear, you could at least move side to side in X's hallways, even if there was no point to doing so).

The writing was horrible. As you said, there are cringe-worthy moments all over the place. The dialogue is atrocious, the character motivations frequently felt confusing and out of character, and the story's premise rarely held together. You spend 90% of the story going around in circles with the characters, waiting for them to come to a conclusion (all of which could have been avoided had Anima just pulled a Barthandelus and just said "yo, go kill that moon", instead of wasting time with the visions). The character sub-plots were ridiculous, and only held together thanks to the non-plot moments, when they actually seemed like real characters. That's right, the writing was at its best when it wasn't dealing with the plot, and that's not a good sign for your story. Finally, the whole "fake out" with Sazh was one of the most pathetic, poorly written, and blatantly obvious attempts to elicit an undeserved emotional response I've ever seen, in any form of media. No one believed it, even for a moment. Let's say they actually went ahead and did it, exactly the way they did, except when they cut away, Sazh actually shoots himself. No one would have believed it. They'd keep waiting, and waiting, for Sazh to come back. And only when the game is over would most of them go "oh, gosh, he really did... Wow". There's still no one who would have taken it at face value, but it would have had some impact, and a deserved emotional response. As it is, it is merely the finale of an utterly pathetic debacle of writing.

The combat I actually enjoyed. Eventually. Again, it was horribly, horribly paced. The combat is only fun once you actually get to take advantage of the systems. The game locks you down and restricts you so much that for 90% of the game, you don't have the tools needed to let you make choices in combat. You literally just hit auto-attack 99% of the time and win everything. Only once you unlock all the jobs and a lot more abilities for those jobs do you actually begin to have some impact on the combat with how you play.

It wasn't my least favorite Final Fantasy, but it was not one I would rate particularly high on my list.