I won't include the part about maxing out your stats in both games, as they both had a different system, so you really can't compare them. Now, if you judge based soley on weapons, I think Cloud takes the cake. Why? Contrary to popular belief, I think that Cloud really has no trouble swinging his sword at all for a long period of time, plus he has a bigger sword, and he's much faster than Squall. I know this is AU and everything, but take KH as an example. Who was harder to beat? Squall or Cloud? Cloud of course, he was much better with his attacks.
Cloud's sword is ridiculuous, a simple concept called torque would show that. Squall has the battle training and doesn't have the noticeable weaknesses Cloud has. (the (SPOILER)oh I just gave the black materia to Sephiroth syndrome.... as I like to call it ) Cloud moving faster (all the characters in 7 move fast so the non-comparable factor easily comes into affect on this one) in the animation just shows that Square wanted to have short animations. (makes sense as the animations had nothing really going for them in 7, plus all the earlier FF's had fast animations.) Square made Cloud in KH better just to appease the annoyingly large FF7 crowd. (Plus Leon didn't even remind me of Squall. Square totally messed that up. They also took away all of Squall's good attacks.) (popularity of a game (FF7) does not tell us which character is stronger. It doesn't even tell us which character is better.)
If you don't want to go on the battle system, then you have to take all this stuff into account=Cloud still loses.
Squall, no doubt. In my eyes, superior to all the other main characters in FF.
Exactly. In all the FF characters, only Auron is comparable with him in my eyes.