Anyway, why no FF8?
It's a bigger game than FF7 and 9. I would say it is production complexity compared to the others. The amount of gameplay features is a lot higher than the other FF games; it also has a lot more pre-rendered assets. I don't know from the engineering side, but saying the source code is gone is likely not the biggest problem if people are hacking and modding the PC version. It was a very ambitious project and might have a lot of extra complexities we're not aware of.
I highly doubt it is for any sales potential reason as FF8 is one of the big three gigantic commercial successes in the franchise, along with FFX and FF7. FF12 was the 4th highest, about 2 million below FF8 and X, and 4 million below FF7.
The other possibility is that they have something bigger planned for the future and they can't dedicate the resources, maybe the 20th anniversary, which is next year. This is the most likely scenario, IMO.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
