Sometimes it's very difficult to tell if a group of people complaining is actually the majority, or just a very vocal minority for what it's worth. It's sort of strange for me anytime I see people on the internet talking about how awful FF13 was, because in the community I hang out in it's the only one just about everyone can agree on as being good, while we're highly polarized on most others.

I personally would rank it as the best of the numbered series in terms of both story and gameplay, but obviously different people look for and like different things in their games. Strangely enough, 13's the one where I feel like my actions in a fight has the the most meaning - positive and negative status effects felt useful, there were good reasons to do more than just spam on the basic attack as fast as possible and casting cure as needed (which is honestly all I ever did or needed to do in 1-9). Acting giving half a crap about all my abilities, especially the buffs/debuffs, as a really refreshing change of pace. It was less about micromanaging ever single action and more about controlling the flow and pace of the fight, which I found extreme satisfying.

Story wise - well it depends on how well you're able to connect with the characters, since it's far more about them than it is some grandiose overarching plot, but I can sort of understand that not really being everyone's thing. Especially since not all of them are designed to be likeable by everyone, but I always thought it was kind of neat to see how the characters I didn't care much for made the ones I did like behave. I'm pretty comfortable saying that the end of Chapter 8 was probably my favorite point in the entire series. There's a lot of stuff to like in the game for those of us that like watching characters interact with one another more than we care about defeating the next Ultimate Evil Overload.