Why can't Square make more games like FFIX?

[Rase]

And @Rase, as far as I know Square had already merged with Enix when they produced FFX-2. My copy has "SquareEnix" slapped on it anyway.

Noted. I don't have a copy, so I was just going by release date vs. date of merger.

[Certainly not true...] any assertion that the companies that make up Square, once they were acquired were free to continue doing as they wished.

I'm assuming you mean teams, not companies. I don't know either way what the teams did when the merger happened, only that there were 10 total: Square 1 (Yoshinori Kitase, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts), 2 (Akitoshi Kawazu, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles), 3 (Hiromichi Tanaka, Final Fantasy), 4 (Yasumi Matsuno, Final Fantasy, Ogre Battle), 5 (Yusuke Hirata, All Star Pro-Wrestling), 6 (Toshiro Tsuchida, Front Mission), 7 (Takashi Tokita, Hanjuku Hero), and 8 (Koichi Ishii, Mana), and then Enix 1 (Ari Miyake, Dragon Quest) and 2 (Yosuke Saito, other games). Since then I'm sure things have changed, but I'm also sure that Square Enix didn't stop any franchises they thought they could make a good amount of money on.

I believe Square took steps to curtail games they saw as competing with FF and their Dragon game..the Ogre Battle games are an example of that..and they abandoned other games such as the Chrono and Mana games altogether.

I highly doubt the Ogre Battle games ever did numbers close to those of Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and the last one was on the Neo Geo Pocket Color back on 2000. I'm willing to bet that the team was not able to get a project greenlighted or simply has not had the time before considering any fear of the game "stealing" sales from the companies core franchises. If I remember correctly the key players in the Chrono games have said they would want all people on board before making another, and a few of these people have their own studios now so that isn't likely. Square tried to continue the Mana series but Koichi Ishii screwed up Dawn of Mana so they reined him back to handheld games. Simple business.

The only way we'll ever see a return to the games like FFIX is a complete collapse at Square and a reshuffling of their developement team.

I'm sure fans of FFII back in the day were lamenting the same way when III and IV came out. Final Fantasy games are all unique, so condemning the series because the more recent ones don't grab you seems rather silly.