Plus let's face it, levelling up isn't actually HARD it's just time consuming. "Oh no I've just learned something new and need to move on to find out the next part of this exciting story, wait first lets do some 'challenging' walking round in circles pressing attack repeatedly for a couple of hours."
FFVII was easy when you knew how to play it, so was VIII, that's because they took knowledge of the game to be really good at them. Sure they weren't exactly that hard first time through, but without knowing a few tricks they weren't painfully easy if you didn't want to spend ages wandering around levelling or sitting watching summon animations. Then of course they had the element that if you were new to FF or not very good you could just take longer by doing all that and still get through the game without breaking the controller in half.

I do think IX and X were a step down from earlier FFs, but thats just my opinion. Actually X was an interactive movie with annoying characters and mini-games that were designed purely as an experiment in what people will put up with to complete a game, but that's not the point.