The road to release of every artistic or commercial enterprise is paved with thousands of dead ideas. Deal with it.

Ya I can, and according to all the praise the games got your obviously in the minority.  Also was Nomura even the writer for those games?  I don't think he was.

He won me over in the openning paragraph
"the first decision we made was to make sure that FFXV would have a complete, coherent story in one game."

Its certainly a shame we won't see Nomura's full vision but I also can't fault Tabata for addressing issues he saw in the project. At the end of the day if Nomura did his job we would have had the game in 2011, we also have no idea whether these narrative changes are good or bad.

" We went from a darkish final fantasy feat. a pretty cool protag and an evenly strong, contrasting female protag, all with supposedly strong romeo/juliet influences to boyband roadtrip complete with strong bromance and now, newly included, fangirl #1 luna."

How has Noctis changed other then his clothes? The boyband was already an essential part of the game before Tabata took over, they were the only characters we ever saw as playable. We've literally only seen one shot of Luna and in the previous iteration we only saw 2 scenes of stella.

Tonally we can't we really compare the two seeing as 90% of what was shown from versus was from the same scenario and 90% of what we've seen from XV is from episode duscae and the laviathan attack (both having different tones). Any 40 hour plus game is going to shift in tone as they progress and during different set pieces.

The only thing I'm certain of is that I would have liked to take control of the other members. Also I prefered their previous costumes but I'm sure Nomura is responsible for the new ones too. Its 2015 would be nice for the game to have optional costumes along the way lol

Them saying that they removed her to make the story self-contained makes me think that she was involved in some cliffhanger (a la XIII-2) or had some other ties to the XIII universe (maybe she was a L'Cie or something) that they wanted to get away from.

I don't mind too much that she was removed. Just make a good game

Wait, you forged this opinion of her character based on that 3 seconds shot we got of her? She didn't appear to be a damsel in distress at all in that shot. I don't get how you came up with that from seeing her in smiling and looking at the camera... 

Actually, you know what, if the story is more self-contained, then all the better. The less Final Fantasy XIII connections, the better, imo. I'm tired of this L'Cie/Fal Cie BS that has overun the past few Final Fantasy games from the XIII Trilogy to even Type-0. To me, they failed in making the lore palpable and appealing. It needs to go.

Seconded.

OT: Can't say I'm affected either way from these announcements. 

exactly who messed up inside of Square-Enix is anyone's guess. Could be the higher ups, could be Nomura, could be a mix of both.

honestly don't see any reason to be outrage since we bearly anything about Stella and that she could of for all we know be a poorly written character but granted we may never know but i have a feeling she was cut for a reason that might have made the story a bit better.

Well at the end of the day we don't know much about neither Versus nor the final product of FF15.

It always looked pretty much detached from FF13, but apparently there were story elements that tied into it. But honestly I couldn't tell from the trailers, which was very different in tone and design.

One thing that I'm a bit worried about is that the darker, more epic tone of the Versus trailers (which I really liked) seems to be all but gone from what we've seen. But who knows; it might still be there in the final release.
The main concern I have is if FF15 will ever release in the complete, polished-to-a-shine way we want/expect from a Final Fantasy game.
I mean they seem to be spending a lot of time on this Duscae demo, so I sure hope they're still working towards the complete game in a foreseeable future.