This is probably just my rose tinted glasses and nostalgia speaking but I always thought FF7 (the original) had the best combination of real time and turn based combat, it felt dynamic and tense but also tactical at the same time. Materia was the ideal fun upgrade and customization system and I only grew to love it more over the years of being bombarded with looter-shooter / diablo-like / gear treadmill progression systems that are being shoehorned even in places where they don't belong.
Hearing from Yoshi-P that he (or the analysts at CU3 I guess) don't think that such gameplay would appeal to new generations of gamers is just disheartening to me. Is there even any other AA or AAA studio that does these kinds of games well?