[things] that could have been a simple attempt by translator(s)/developers at being subtle
I really think this sort of gets at the heart of why I couldn't "feel" the Retranslation when I tried it. It was like the dialogue, though
technically fixed in a ton of places (which is good), had also been robbed of a good deal of its spontaneity and charm. Many of the changes seem unnecessary to me. People rarely speak in grammatically proper forms if they have not prepared for the situation. I really almost enjoy the obvious mistranslations beacause they make the game more HUMAN.
The emphatic weirdness, ambiguity, animism and reverence towards all things "cute" are what made the entire ff series so enjoyable for me; so far, the Retranslation seems to resist these things, imo. I've seen too little of it to be so general, and I've been rude to Dan in the past so I really hope he won't take my criticism as hostility; I'm actually a big fan of his now, but nobody is perfect and no translation is perfect...
I'm going to play it with the translation on and I won't be surprised if I change my mind about it afterwards. I'm super impressed at what you've done with this one Dan, I kinda wasn't sure you'd be able to finish it when you started, considering how many other millions of things you also did during this period... I wish I could do what you can with the 0s and 1s buddy. If I had the dedication and focus I would love to try my hand at fixing the dialogue myself, using your translation as a guide. Not just to fix the big gaping problems like everyone's beloved Scorpion battle confusing warning--don't you think that might have been a deliberate tactic for the game to mess with you? That's something they got really into later... But yeah, also I would want to try to preserve the original style and feel of the dialogue, wherever possible, as an option.
There's something good about being mystified sometimes (like the movie Akira, right? What the hell is going on there... nvm I don't want to hear it I'll watch it again next year) and I'll admit to being pretty confused by ff7 the first time I played it, but it wasn't really because it was badly translated. It was Japanese and weird--like Akira, like Lost in Translation. Wtf just happened? Idk, I'm not Japanese. But let's do it again.