What exactly do you mean by "the direction" they are taking? I think it is a good thing that a game appeals to more than the nerdiest nerds. I'm sure S-E thinks so too. Not only does it mean more money to the company, but the stories will be experienced by more people. If the same amount of people played Final Fantasy today as in the early 90's, I don't think Square would be able to make enough money from them. Games are much more expensive to make today, so you have to appeal to a bigger crowd. And admit it, the original Final Fantasy's battle system sucks :p. You can't expect people to enjoy it when they're used to todays standard. It'd be like selling a car from 1920 and saying: "Hey, this was high tech stuff when it was new! You should still use it!" Some people would be fascinated by it ofcourse, but not many. That's why they had to fix the battle system in DoS.
There's still enough challenges in the FF games anyway. If a regular playthrough isn't enough, you could always do one of the insanely low level games. I think that gameplay-wise, the Final Fantasy games have just gotten better and better. FFX-2's one of the games with best gameplay in the series. In my opinion, it outweighs the less-than-decent story and horrible music. However, the later games' stories just haven't appealed that much to me, I just't can't seem to get as involved in them as before. Then again, maybe I'm just growing old. I'm still looking forwards to FFXII though, I think I will like that story.
