I think Badgenome was implying the same thing and I basically agree.

That's the problem; with Wada's infatuation with the "west" he's gonna want less RPG elements in the games.  You gotta realize making a world, npcs, and the like take a lot of time, more than most other genres of games, 2 years is not enough time to develop a proper RPG.

It's relative. A developer can take a lot more than that, and others take a lot less.

If a company establishes a good framework, the development time could be reduced and most of the time will be spent on the game's content instead of the technical stuff and it could take less than two years.

If SE has a framework that needs to be reworked each time to meet the project's requirements, then it's a mess and takes a lot of time to develop, tweak and debug. 

This is true, but typically RPGs from Japan have very different art styles for each town and people.  It's hard to reuse things now adays.  Like it was a lot easier back in the snes days and nes days but not now.

I was on the internet back then....and by 1999, it was "pretty vast". No one talked crap about FF. That was a bonified AAA title and franchise. It was up there with the best of the best.

FFX-2 was the first nail in the coffin when it comes to fans of Square and the franchise. That game was a SERIOUS drop in quality.

i dont think Wada can be held accountable tbh, hes a buisness man, i dont think he has anything to do with the way the games are made, he just runs the company. and i dont think its just Wada whos been infatuated with the west, because Toriyama has discussed how hes tried to make FF13 more like a FPS, and Kitase says that FF13 isnt designed to be an RPG.

and imo these problems with the development team seems to come from the top-down structure. as in 1 or 2 people calling the shots, and the problems that are occuring that the 300 members of staff were having were simply not addressed by this structure, because theres simply too many people to be managed in this way. but for these reasons i think its impossible to blame Wada alone...

Yeah it does seem like it was a nightmare, and the key problem seems to be switching from the PS2 to the new HD engine on the PS3. i doubt they'll use CT engine in the same way again, i imagine they'll incorperate it in some way because there must be things that its good at that Luminous inst?? yeah well according to someone else on this thread it was designed to be for cutscenes. and imo if they indeed trash it, then at least 5 years have been wasted!!! and this is completely unacceptable!

either way imo it seems to be the problem is more deep rooted at the management level; because i doubt Sakaguchi has these problems at Mistwalker, and i doubt things would have gone so wrong if he was still at SE. i think people forget, that even though his creativity went into FF, he also managed the development teams very well, up until the 10 installment and his departure.

Now I love sakaguchi, but, in this society, he did enough plenty to get canned. Do I think he deserved it? no, because he made Squaresofts most popular franchises. but that's capitalism.

Sakaguchi, did the FF movie which (I loved) and massively failed. and there's no way to pin this on anyone other than Sakaguchi, it was completely his project... worse financially than anything SE has done since... (Except maybe FFXIV but that remains to be seen, and I still doubt it). the FF movie was one of the worst flops in Movie History.

Also, keep in mind, that FFVII was originally  an SNES project started in 1994, then it got moved as a N64 project, then it got moved to playstation. While this happened in the span of 3 years instead of 5. FF13 was not the first time this happened to a franchise.

Sakaguchi doesn't even have a full dev team at mistwalker, as Blue Dragon was co-developed with  Artoon, and Lost Odyssey was developed with Feelplus.

Also Luminous is based off of the old Eidos Engines. So without exact facts. It's impossible to know what SE intends to do with it. They are different tools for the devs to use. So it's entirely possible that depending on the game, the devs... eidos, or Square-Enix, will use the engine that best fits the project.

For example, Bioware.
Mass Effect Uses the Unreal Engine. While Dragon Age Uses the Eclipse Engine which is based off of their old Aurora Engine.

These are fair points, but FF7 was a different scenario. they had to switch to PS1 because of disagreements with Nintendo about the lack of storage on the catridge. and it wasnt just Sqaure, Konami also developed MGS for the PS1 after having previously had the MGS series on Nintendo. the point is FF13 was already 1 year into production - was it really necessary to scrap most the work and begin again using a completely new engine, that no developer had any experience with.

they may use CT engine again, but imo using it for FF13 was a mistake! well either way i think that Sakaguchi's management skills are missed at SE and i think that the Last Story will show this. the Spirits Within was a diasaster yes, but thats for other creative factors, it dosent change that when he was directing TSW, Sqaure managed to produce FF8, 9 and 10 within that time, to much critical and commerical success.