I believe Sakaguchi once stated that the point with Aerith's (and also Zack's) death was that the world doesn't stop turning just because someone died. Yeah it sucks, yeah it's sad, but the world at large doesn't care; life goes on and in the characters' case they still have an explicit goal to reach. They all find ways to grieve in their own way, without making it a huge let's-all-wallow-in-self-pity session or anything like that.

It's why no matter how cool Zack's death was in Crisis Core, it'll always feel to me like it kinda missed the point of them originally making it a completely anticlimactic ambush by I believe it was 3 Shinra soldiers. Instead of, you know, a gigantic smurfing army.

DON'T YOU THINK MAYBE THE OUTCOME COULD BE A BIT DIFFERENT IF YOU HADN'T DECIDED TO JEOPARDIZE THE WHOLE THING?
*shrug* It's your own choice to decide whether they remove the materia from the rocket or not, and yet you're blaming it on the characters? Don't abuse your status as a world-crossing witch, man =P Though I will say I never had the feeling they were devastated, they were basically expecting it to fail but seeing it directly still bums them out, understandably enough.

Also, now you know why Yuffie was an optional character ^^