I was really trying my best to avoid this thread but boredom got the better of me it seems.

In terms of development turnaround, SE itself has admitted that all of their mainline games from XII-XV have suffered from behind the scenes issues and that's why the games seem to take so long to produce. The Ultimania and certain interviews pretty much point to the fact that in addition to the demands that new technology has brought to development, that SE has internal issues as well that seem to be linked to the fact that they are still trying to make these games like they did twenty years ago when they had a tenth of the staff and easier hardware to work with.

XII was delayed because of the programming issues of trying to build an MMO scaled world on the PS2 without the use of the HUD peripheral that XI used, as well as the very well known resignation of it's director halfway through the game's development which left the remaining team needing to finish the plot and direction of the title.

XIII suffered from being pushed back to a next gen console which made what little early development on it obsolete. Was built simultaneously with the finnicky Crystal Tools engine which kept delaying the game's development and ended up being so tailored made for XIII that it was deemed unusable for the vXIII developers. The game also suffered from mismanagement, most notable being the fact the game didn't even have a real core gameplay concept until the demo was made a year before the game's release. There is also the apocryphal story of an artist spending months making a rock fixture that is only on the screen for five seconds in a cutscene showing that priorities on the project were pretty skewed.

XIV suffered from such misguided management that it's original director had to resign to save face, the game had to go under a two year retool to get back into the black, and this retool ultimately delayed every AAA project in the companies pipeline and was likely the direct cause for why vXIII ended being rebranded. Yoshi-P again mentions that resources were being used poorly as developers over-emphasized graphical quality which ended up creating several of the game's server issues, as well as the director ignoring many of the quality of life enhancements that the MMO genre had experienced over the decade since WoW hit the scene. This game's original performance issues hit the company so hard, they're still paying for it.

XV doesn't really need an introduction on it's development problems, but much like the last two games, one thing gleamed from the interviews with the director is the recurring story of SE having a poor management style which causes a lot of the development problems. Director Tabata spends just as much time discussing the issues with trying to fix the development side of things as he was just redesigning the ten year old relic. He discusses issues of entitlement and poor accountability among his department heads as well as an overall issue of management not keeping everyone on the same page which has been a recurring issue echoed in the Ultimania interviews for XIII and XIV.

As for the issues of Square-Enix as a whole, I feel my personal issues stem from just the simple fact that all of the designers I loved from the 90s era have all left the company for the most part by 2005. This combined with SE's desire to really stick to just the safe bet entries for over a decade by simply making sequels, trying to turn numbered FFs into mini-franchises, and often being too afraid to make anything non-mobile that doesn't have the FF moniker on it because they're too afraid of taking any kind of loss has largely disillusioned me from the company. When you think back to what Square was producing in the 90s, it's hard to think of a really bad entry of their high profile titles and the company had several non-FF themed franchises going for it as well. Sure they had some low profile duds of course, but I don't think we can even argue the fact that most of SE's best known IPs and beloved games stem from this era almost exclusively. On the other hand, it's really difficult to name maybe ten really fantastic first party games made by SE since 2000 that most fans would be like "oh yeah, that's a great game!". That's not to say SE doesn't make good games, but I also feel it's obvious that both the fans and even some of the developers would rather dwell on past glories than anything new. The fact that most fans were more interested in a remake of a 20 year old game over the announcement of a new installment says many things about where fans feel the franchise is.

Overall, I feel the biggest difference between SE now and Square from the old days is both the fact that the company is more profit driven, which itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but more importantly, it just doesn't feel like it has people working there who just want to make cool games, instead, everything feels like it's kind of got through this marketing filter to be acceptable for release. Square led the industry, but SE just feels like another rank and file member of it.