In the interests of fairness, I should note that there are plenty of "old school" gamers who bash the new ones without knowing anything about them at all.

I enjoy both the old and new games, however some of the new ones stay in my mind more. FFVII, for instance, was my first FF, and remains my favourite. The characters are, in some instances, more believeable in the newer games. In FFIV, for instance, (SPOILER)Cecil gets used and abused, turned into an instrument of murder, then fights back against his own people, losing a siege in the process, then finds out his beloved has been abducted, then gets shipwrecked and left thinking that all of his friends are either dead (Rydia, Edward, Yang) or have betrayed him (Kain). And all that's only a few hours into the plot... yet he never falters or suffers any kind of trauma, he just keeps soldierin' on. In the later FFs, human suffering and personal conflict is far more prevalent, more believeable. Cloud Strife, for instance. Even the oft-criticised Tidus of FFX has a more realistic response to his changed circumstances. As the games' characters have become to look more human, they've also started to behave more human.
In general, anyway. There are strengths and weaknesses in both the new and old games, in this regard.

Improved visuals are by no means a bad thing, either. It's just like with a novel - a crude, basic Mr Men-style description of the scenery lets you know what's there, but a well-written story can bring the scenery to life in a way that a sketchy outline can't. The same can apply to visual representations. In FFX, (SPOILER)Sin's destructive attack on Kilika would've had little emotional resonance if it'd just been shown as a two-dimensional representation, with a dozen-odd wide-eyed sprites standing in the identical "shocked" pose as the screen turns blue and they disappear.

If The Lord of the Rings movies had used jerky stop-motion monsters and cheap painted backdrops, the effect would've been less immersive, less 'real', less faithful to the books. Visual quality doesn't make or break a good story, but it certainly doesn't hurt, either.[q=dman]..."oh I played FFVI and it's gfx sux. It's all about some ppl called Biggs and Wedge who kill people with some sorcereress lady." Personally I believe that's blasphemy.[/q]Most criticisms of FFX and X-2 are very similar - a superficial rendering of the first few minutes of the game, with no appreciation for the depth and complexity of the plot. It seems that some people just need to have conflict, criticism and confrontational but petty hatreds in their lives, so they make this decisions that they'll adamantly object to any old or new FF games, depending on what they prefer. I prefer my vewpoint, and that shared by most of the people here - the view that there are good and bad things about any games, regardless of age, and different things appeal to different people for different reasons. Being "old" doesn't make a game good or bad by default, neither does being "new'.