There should be way, way more than three Aeriths. Anything that defies fate creates a new world, remember (also new Stamps for some reason).

To be fair, the blame lies with Nojima, not Nomura, same as KH, where Nomura also gets a lot of unfair flak. Also, Kitase, who's clearly past his prime since the 13 days. If anything Nomura is the most moderate of the three and least prone to the craziness.

I finished the game over the weekend. I finished almost all the side quests along the way.
The only reason I'm a little disappointed in Rebirth is because Remake set the bar so high. I know that's unpopular (just look at the Metacritic score differences of about 5 points between the two games), but Remake was tough to put down and despite being a padded experience that didn't really get in the way.
Rebirth has too many minigames of varying quality, some weird story decisions (Imposter Tifa, the way the last chapter handles the battle), and some clunky navigation in several of the regions.
Rebirth is like a 9.2-9.3/10 while Remake is about a 9.5-9.6/10.
Part III needs to tone down minigames immensely as requirements for side quests and the main game, and the navigation of the game world needs to be less tedious and easier.

POST ENDING CONTENT SPOILERS

So... I got to to the final Brutal VR challenge and made it to round 4/5. Hard Mode Gilgamesh is fucking brute... How am I supposed to beat this asshole when I can't even practice against his normal mode form without restarting the whole game? Dammit Square. And... why is he not round 5's boss? I wonder who or what succeeds him! (Probably Sephiroth).

It's crazy how much love and care went into this game. Hard mode is a lot more than some silly stat buffs (this goes for Remake as well). More crazy to me is they managed to develop a massive game in just 3 years. And to think Nomura and his team's projects used to get meme'd for long development times...

Rebirth started production in November 2019, though, so that's slightly north of 4 years. Part 3 should be about the same or slightly shorter, so I can see it being released by the 30th anniversary if they started production last year too.

What?

Nomura left the role of Co-Director to not slow the games development down. He's fully dedicated to Kingdom Hearts now. The speed of the project is due to him not being tied to it. He is just a Creative Director now (He make's sure that everything "Final Fantasy"). I actually expect Part 3 to be out faster than both part 1 & 2.

My thoughts about the final chapter.

- The camera work, voice acting, music and custscenes in general were all fantastic.

- The part where we enter the Forgotten Capital, it was initially very enjoyable, but then the Whispers and Sephiroth appeared, the music and vibe changed, after that it was still enjoyable, but less enjoyable.

- The walk toward Aeirth was particularly great. For once I actually liked the inclusion of Whispers, and how Cloud struggles to walk through them to get closer to Aeirth. I liked what they did with the music during this sequence too.

- It seemed odd not to show Aerith with a sword through her chest, that's probably the most iconic part of that entire iconic scene. Perhaps some kind of censorship law got in the way, which would suck. Its a bit like having Sephiroth walking through the fire during that iconic Nibelheim flashback scene, but not actually showing the fire, because it would burn our poor innocent eyes and that would be ever-so-terrible, so better censor that. Not sure if something similar happened here, but it struck me as a weird design choice either way.

- I like how Aeirth didn't appear to immediately die after being impaled and had some nice brief moments with Cloud as he was holding her - an example showing how subtle expansions of the original story can work well.

- Seeing bizarro Sephiroth was nice.

- I've mentioned this before but having a big epic finale in what is ultimately part way through the original overall FFVII story does feel somewhat out of place. It was like this in Remake too, but with this game, a lot of whatever was going on in this games conclusion distracted me from Aeriths death, which should have been the focal point, or at the very least more of a focal point than it ended up being as a result of what was going on.

- The Zack stuff was meh. The premise with Zack seemed more interesting to me at the end of Remake than what we were left with by the end of Rebirth. Effectively Zack is now a slider, hoping between dimensions or something? I was somewhat interested in Zacks world, the Cloud of his timeline, etc, but that world seems to have been discarded in favor of opening the door to multiple worlds. Unfortunately I haven't been given a reason to be interested in these other worlds as of yet. Often I find that pondering the answer to a mystery is more interesting than what the answer to said mystery ends up being, this may be an instance of that.

- I'm not convinced that this multiple world stuff is going anywhere interesting. It seems "reunion" now means a reunion of worlds, but to what end? So that Sephiroth gets more power? I guess we'll find out where this goes, hopefully nowhere too convoluted.

- I've seen a few theories about the ending cutscene, where Cloud can see the rift in the sky. Some say it's just a result of him being screwed up in the head, others say he's now more in tune with other realities, and can now see that his world is another one of those parallel dimensions doomed to die, and perhaps the OG FFVII is the "true reality".

I've described my thoughts about this game on this thread as I've been playing it over the months, and I've been quite vocal about my gripes. Despite that, overall I'd probably give the game an 8 out of 10. The primary issues I have are to do with the open world, the tediousness, the pacing and the minigames. 
I had started to go back to do the side content that I had skipped, but I stopped a week or two ago because it was dull. There was some stupid goblin which wanted me to kill cactuar and I got bored. It's very unfortunate that certain materia, as well as Zack and Sephiroth VR missions are locked behind this open world and side content, if it wasn't for that design choice, I may have given the game a 9 or an 8.5.

I'm aware the director is Hamaguchi but Nomura was still involved and somehow didn't curse the team this time around!

On a serious note, I hardly know anything about the guy's efficiency and what was going on with SE's slow projects in general, aside from him seemingly spreading himself thin working on multiple games simultaneously for a while.

I agree FF7 Remake is a 9.5/10 game, but I don't think you can compare the two games. They are two different animals. The first game is a tighter game because it takes place over three acts in a localised geographical space. The second game is an adventure game in that you are constantly exploring and the world is much bigger. As a fan I can't criticise that because it generally follows the same progression as the original game where the world exploration opened up after Midgar. I don't think you can make a direct comparasion because they don't operate the same way in story progression.

I appreciate that there are a lot of minigames and things like that, but I did enjoy the most of them and if nothing else this is an RPG; they have to fill the game with this type of content. It was a criticism of Remake that the sidequests were not up to scratch, so they had to give us more this time, which they have.

The only issues I have with the game is how difficult the combat is to gain comptiency. Its not like Remake which was a lot simpler. Its complicated. I also didn't like how the last area of the game was not explorable.

I thought the game was very impressive. Though my onely major critique of the game was that it had way too many minigames. Though the glorious cutscenes made up for this!

Managed to somehow beat VR Gilgamesh on my 2nd attempt even though he annihilated me on the 1st. But of course Round 5's boss whooped me. It may take me a while to beat this challenge without cheese.

For Legendary, I completed the challenges for Red XIII, Yuffie, Cloud and Tifa in this order. Red's was by far the easiest to me (I think I got it on my first attempt). Aerith's (with the current setup, I literally die seconds in lol) , Barrot's, and Cait Sith's challenges remain before I unlock the final two.