Lessee...

Not everyone wants to spend years leveling up to be able to use a character effectively.

Also, no, I didn't have any problems with her in the Temple of the Ancients, because it's an easy-ass dungeon with Cloud and Cid.

You still haven't commented on one of my observations:

Yes, Aeris has very high attack power with the Umbrella. However, you can't even get the umbrella until halfway through disc 1, and her ultimate weapon even later(and it has no materia growth, so sucks in disc 1). That makes her only as effective as you say for half of the disc, and heavily dependent on what she has equipped. The other characters don't have that dependency - Tifa, for example, is effective with whatever current weapon you just got at the store.


The lovely thing about FFVII is that you can use absolutely ANYONE because the differences between characters in combat is so minimal that with the right materia combos, it just won't matter at all.
There is still one very important difference: limit breaks.