I understand the feelings of confusion with the gameplay FF7R.  It worked great for me, but it's not for everyone I think. I'm good at real time strategy and real time action management

They tried plain action with FF16 and this was the one I didn't like as much. It's basically press the same buttons when your skill bar is filled again. No strategy, no tactical enough, no real challenge... no need to memorize enemy patterns, dodging or anything 

Played for the story only

If I could choose one gameplay path for future games I hope they stick with FF7R instead of FF16. The former is pretty unique and special, the later is just generic 

FF's problem seems to be three pronged.

1) Because its gameplay varies greatly between entries and each story is self-contained, it lacks a cohesive and continuous identity. As a result, its fanbase is fractured, and liking one or more entries does not mean one will necessarily be inclined to buy the next one.

2) One thing it has tried to build an identity around is having lavish graphics, but that has kept it off portable systems, which is where Japan prefers to play.

3) As a result of this and the decline of home consoles in Japan since the PS2, the series has very little pull with anyone who started gaming after the 6th generation. Young people never played it growing up, so they have no attachment to the series.

Personally, I'm playing through FF16 myself at the moment (though I'm not Japanese for the record lmao) and I am quite enjoying it, but I have no nostalgia for FF7 so I'm not interested in Remake/Rebirth.

This, you pretty much nailed it on the head. As for FF7 vs XVI im in the opposite boat. I think 7's graphic style and combat is way more appealing for me (and I really like what I have played so far, on chapter 9) but 16.... for me at least, there's so much that makes it seem so generic and boring, even the graphics I think look like a step down from 7's, maybe im wrong, idk, but there's nothing about that game that makes me wanna play it as it looks very very generic, like some random MMO. Not sure if others feel this way, but the competition for gaming is very competitive now with many many big and highly rated games releasing all the time, it's easy for a game to get lost in the ocean of gaming. 

I don't think that that analysis is very correct as twilight princess came out and sold 9 million and the Wii and mobile titles did amazing for what they were. 

And FF15 sold 10 million. The Wii and mobile Zelda titles, as a whole, did way worse than 16/7R/Rebirth if anything.

Of course, the development costs are higher (and the games themselves more expensive) for FF but still that's quite similar in terms of market penetration.

Zelda isn't built to be a stupidly hight multi million seller franchise, they just happen to put out good numbers, and you can argue most, if not all of Nintendo's games are built to be more budget friendly

The problem with ff7R is that the game looks and feels expensive, not just in the game, but also in the marketing, and we've seen with quare enix with game like the older Lara croft games that these big budget games NEED to sell way more then they are

And we know what happens when games don't meet those lofty financial sales, the workers who brought us the game get layed off

Nah, I think there are multiple issues for this. The mainline Final Fantasy games have been primarily Playstation focused and Nintendo has been the primary gaming platform in Japan for sometime now. Japan has been portable focused for quite awhile and Sony gave up on that space. Square Enix, in my opinion, slaps the Final Fantasy name on too many titles. So they've created two issues. Gamers don't know what to expect from a Final Fantasy game and they've fractured the fandom. People have different expectations of that FF game is and when that expectation isn't met, they don't buy the game. Finally with Sony basically turning their back on the Japanese market, they've limited sales of any games they have that would appeal to Japan.

Both BOTW and TOTK took 5+ years of development and it's unlikely Aonuma's team has less than 200+ employees. A lot was being invested here no matter how you slice it. These were probably the most expensive Nintendo games by far.

They're probably the two most expensive games Nintendo has ever made, but I seriously doubt BOTW/TOTK cost nearly as much as Final Fantasy 16/Rebirth, simply due to not having to create highly detailed (semi-)realistic assets. Budget tends to scale with graphical complexity and FF are more than a generation ahead of Zelda in that department.

Budget scales with development time and staff size since it's basically how much you're paying devs and for how long. Artists who create graphic assets are probably at the bottom of the payment chain if anything, which is a shame but it is what it is.

FF16 doesn't exactly scream a massive budget, IMO (no towns, little monster variety, not a lot of VA, etc.). That looks more like the case for Rebirth, true, but it didn't take too long to launch, a lot of stuff could be reused from Remake, and debugging UE4 isn't exactly an unknown quantity.