While they were never nearly on the same level as EA (very few companies are), the reason Nomura is in the position he is to begin with is partially because the company has that mindset (as long as it makes money, who cares-- people don't want sublety and creativity, they want production values, marketability and flashiness), and there was a very distinct and unquestionable transition towards that attitude when Squaresoft merged with Enix and became Square Enix. Not even exaggerating-- there are quite literally leaked images somewhere on the internet that revealed that their internal company-wide order upon merging was to abandon passion projects and start focusing on milking as much money as humanly possible.
In the 90s and early 2000s, when Hironobu Sakaguchi was in charge (both he and Matsuno-- whom I've always felt were the strongest visionaries within the company-- ended up leaving because they disagreed with this shift in attitude), Squaresoft was a company that oozed creative integrity, to the extent that their entire reputation was built on the fact that they were willing to risk all financial security/sense to boldly create the most ambitious and uncompromising epics they could (they did this a couple of times, including with the original FFVII-- the company would have gone bankrupt if that failed, yet it was still pretty uncompromising). They were never exactly shakespeare or anything, but it was very admirable and inspired regardless. Once that finally caused them to go bankrupt because of the Spirits Within movie bombing, they did a complete 180 and that's how we got to the consistently soulless and tasteless but profitable FFXIII, FFXV, and Kingdom Hearts type games that we get now-- Nomura is just part of the problem.
Regarding replaying the original, that's good to hear. Be prepared for a lot of growing pains, but I think it'll be worth it in the end if you manage to see past the bad translation.
