Who was the superior protagonist?

[Example]

Zack only gets depressed once you fight with Genesis for the first time and lose Angeal. After the time skip, he's actually back to being his cheerful self up until the ending. It helps that Gloom Cloud overshadows whatever moodiness Zack can have, and I was honestly more disturbed by Aerith being uncharacteristically gloomy in the game.

Did that actually happen in CC? Dear god, did they get ANYTHING right in that game?

For a PSP game it was pretty? I honestly feel the only returning characters done well in the game were Zack and possibly Tseng. Everyone else is surprisingly out of character from VII's version of them, or have at least had one or two personality quirks cranked to 11 in Cloud's case.

CC implies that Aerith gets all her spunk cause it rubbed off on her from Zack, despite VII showing in Aerith's childhood scenes that she was always spunky and optimistic.

CC also showed us more of pre-insanity Sephiroth. Also that didn't make sense to me either since she's still overly sweet and dainty at the end of CC.