I approve the addition of Will Smith to the cast

You got this right, go apply for a job at square :D

I hope they keep Barret's obscenities and urban lingo. I also hope they keep the Honeybee/Cloud crossdressing sequence.

I think he meant the actual world map, not everything. The individual towns and locations will have been upgraded to silly levels.  Imagine Junon, a massive military base with personel wandering around (or in this case, getting ready for your leader to visit), with a massive cannon sitting above it all. But the world map, needs to be simple and an actual world map like before, it can be bigger and prettier, but it still needs to be a world map. You know with a ship later and the Tiny Broncho earlier only being able to explore shallow water. That kind stuff.

@Bolded: No. Aeris's role must not be filled by any characters after her demise. The impact of her demise is a key point of the game and the fact that her absence is felt after that makes the story and game much more powerful. Very bad idea you got there.

I can see that with FF6, sorry it's been a while since I played it however you can make any character into any role by the end based on the magic they learn, in FF7, the magic they learn is dependent on the Materia you give them. In FF8 the role they play is dependent on how you junction magic. While in FF6, 7 and 8, all character were still individual, they had their own specials/limits, some had extra build in powers (so Barret with Long Range guns or Quistis Blue Magic only she learned).

But on the last bit, no, that changes the gameplay, it means in certain times you may be left short because you had the wrong character in your party. FF7 has a lot of times when characters are not in your party, when they split up, go crazy, so characters need a certain amount of 'clean slate' to build them correctly.

Yep, you are ignoring a lot of back end plot mentioned in the game. Bugenhagen explains that the Holy Materia is ancient and special, only works when the planet is in danger. Sephiroth was stopping it from working, the heroes role was to free it. Holy and the Lifestream did stop the meteor but part of the Holy magic is to defend the planet, and the planet does not care if humans exist. It's better without them (much like our own).

The heroes stood for the protection of the planet from the first mission to the end, that was their goal and they achieved it perfectly. 

I never said it was instant, just that Holy would remove them, when Advent Children came out saying that people had a weird desease, I hoped that was the desease created by the planet and holy to wipe out the species but they cured it in the film.

The ending was perfect, my friend. It is the proper ending.

EDIT: What do you want? For the team to have a party? High fiving each other and Tifa and Cloud to finally get it on? 

It really wouldnt. FF must let you control the party. Enough of all these ARPGs that play the same. You got FFXV for ARPG. This is a remake, not a reboot. Preserving its essence is vital.

there was always going to be changes but to me there are important aspects that HAVE to be the same like
-story
-the original characters
-locations
-battle system
-music

Level designs arnt likely to be the same it's not like we'd be able to pick up a ffvii guide book from the nineties and use that to play through the game, it will never be identical people have to be ready for that.

There's things they could add to it which in my opinion wouldn't make the game worse or ruin it.
For instance if they added a better side quest feature with more side quests to do. I wouldn't mind if they added a extra party member to the group as long as they're not replacing the main ones we all know. New locations would also be good but again not replacing the originals. While this is going to be like and feel like ffvii, it won't feel identical but that was never going to be the case anyway.

Say what you want, but I want this to be with a different gameplay... still RPG of course, but more action based than turn-based. I'm saying that not because I'm not a fan of turn-based combat RPGs (actually, I am) but because we already have the classic FFVII pretty much everywhere (modern consoles, PC... even cellphones now) and I'd like to play again this in a different point of view (and also, I want it to be successful, and I think this kind of game fits better on this generation)... so, if this turns to be just a graphics enhancement, I'll be disappointed.