If Square Enix made a "FF17" and was just a reskin of Genshin Impact, people would rightfully decry the greed. Sure, it might have a cool story, but because all the characters are locked behind gacha, and you can't progress without certain element-aligned characters you can only get from gacha, and can only upgrade characters with gacha-supplied trash loot, that's not how final fantasy works.

So compare the WoW players who hate story coming here demanding less story, to players coming from gacha-hell games asking why they can't just pay-to-win every piece of gear in the game without actually doing the fights they are rewarded from. You have two opposing gameplay styles. One only wants to do the "Gameplay" and the end goal is fashion, and the other's end goal is fashion and is somehow happy that gameplay is gated off without spending money.

I feel that "Final Fantasy" as it is now, has the right balance, TO Final Fantasy players. We can't have exactly the experience from FF7-X2 because pre-rendered content can only be used once. There is no pre-rendered content in the game other than the opening video. Everything is done in-engine (to various degrees of success.) A newer game than 14 (Eg 15 and 16) may improve the engine, but these games can not repeat VII's success. And to bean counters and business managers, if the "newest" thing doesn't do better than the previous one, then they see it as a failure when it should not be.