X and XIII are personally my favourite two of the series, but I can see how their method of narrative and gameplay wouldn't work for some people, yeah. I do think the hate-on for XIII is overblown in the same way everyone's nostalgia glasses for FFVII exaggerates everything.

That said, and someone mentioned this upthread but I wanted to comment on it specifically: SE isn't one cohesive development team. There are multiple teams working at SE, staggering development of multiple different games at the same time. Furthermore, a -number- of these teams have a track record of getting bogged down in development hell, which is bad for the company's reputation and their bottom line, as mentioned in the above-linked article, so it makes sense that they'd want to focus on busting past their problematic development mindset.