VI and VII essentially have pretty much the same flaws when it comes to quality. That only means that VII is less forgivable, for reasons of experience and technological potential.
FFVI has one advantage that FFVII does not have, which is that it is, as you yourself acknowledged, surprisingly devoid of plot holes or sloppy storytelling for a Final Fantasy title. As I have already once pointed out, the fact that so many people fail to understand basic plot points of VII prove that VII's storytelling is subpar.

The (playable) characters: all but a couple are incredibly shallow and irrelevant to the story (due to interchangablility, part of the game design), having little development outside of their time in the spotlight during their initial recruitment as well as their re-recruitment during the World of Ruin. The three optional characters, Mog, Umaro and Gogo, have essentially nothing. Of the development the characters do see, none of it is irretrievably tied to the setting of VI, thus all but Terra can easily be transplanted into another game and lose nothing for it.
I don't see how this is exactly a weakness, or at least a weakness that is unique in the series to FFVI, because the same can be said of most characters in other FF games.

FFVI's gameplay is acknowledged even by fans of the game to be weaker than FFV's but it is not weaker than the gameplay of nearly every main series entry that came after it (FF Tactics and FFX-2 excluded). Plenty of other games that followed had the same problem with characters being interchangeable in battle. FFIX had the opposite weakness in regressing to FFIV's class system. Square didn't want to repeat themselves using the same battle system for every game so while it might have been nice for every game to have a battle system as sophisticated as FFV's that was never going to happen.

VI's answer to this is simply asking you to surrender control of your characters
This only ever happens in the Colosseum, which is a mini-game most people never even bother with. Apart from that, the only characters who "play themselves" are Gau, Mog, and Umaro, and in the former two cases that's only if you select specific commands (they can still use magic and items like any other character).

I also like how you acknowledge that FFVI "is probably the finest crafted JRPG on the SNES" and then go on to call it "overwhelmingly overrated". Given that even most people who like the game acknowledge its flaws, I fail to see how this applies.


this thread is 5 pages long and not a single one of you have actually compared anything aside from graphics, review scores, sales, and gamefaqs polls of all things
Actually I had already mentioned FFVII's sloppy storytelling.