While i see where youre coming from and agree with the paragraph about monetary incentive in principle (personally i never disagreed with it in the first place), this wasnt about why they made this remake and wether or not they were doing it for the /for the love of the fans, but merely about your assumption of the majority of fans expectations and them being fulfilled or not.
Your position was/is based on the factors: Qualities of source material, why it gained so many fans in the first place, and the fact that this is a remake of said source material, which at first glance makes the stement that most fans didnt want what we seem to be getting a logical conclusion. And without data to the contrary I would have tended towards agreeing with you / coming to the same conclusion.
The problem is that you still draw your conclusions from logic even though experimental/conclusive "data" is already available which shows that this is not how it plays out/ended up playing out effectively/after all. This "data" (being the relatively overwhelmingly positive widespread reception) simply didnt confirm the hypothesis and ended up showing us where the logic didnt pan out (much like with any scientific experiment where the tests dont end up confirming the hypothesis). In this particular case it seems to be the part about what ended up remaining important to fans regardless of what drew them in originally. It seems that (much like with anything else in life actually) the majority 1: Has relatively superficial expectations and 2: has different quality standards and preferences than you assumed (and possibly myself if i had thought about this for a bit before any real data was available) 3: Values visual nostalgia above most else.
Now its late and i dont want to go in too deep but to quickly go over the points you mentioned; Considering what exactly we ended up getting and it still being received as it is we can conclude that
most fans didnt put their emphasis on:
Wether it was strict to the source or heavily reimagined
About translation accuracy
Concrete content of story additions (guardians of fate sounds like a retarded addition indeed btw)
And rather seem to care for:
Relatively superficial nostalgia ("I used to love tifa" "Cloud is a badass" "I remeber first time in midgard" etcetc)
Visual Fidelity (seems to be particularly impactful to a grand majority)
Modernised mechanics (wether or not they are objectively good is another topic and irrelevant to this question) that superficially reference the source material but give off a "fresh feeling" (there is "materia", The "classic" limit breaks are back, "oh i remember this boss", "cant wait to see jenova in HD" etcetc)
Overall it seems that nostalgia combined with heavy modernisation on all fronts is what is most important to the majority of fans as opposed to accuracy towards the source material and general authenticity. Overall way more superficial factors than you assumed.
And while I am not necessarily saying that I agree the fans expectations, I will say that it seems that your expectations of the fans were set too High. "The masses are easy to please" seems to remain true here, and therefore your conclusion at the time of the statement wrong.
And this was the point of my comment regarding your statement about what "most" fans want.
Now this isnt to say that there might not still be negative outrage at some point with the introduction of new elements of any kind but at the time of this comment it seem "most" fans want(ed) this.
Now moving on from this on a lighter note: Its hard to put into words how much I hate the preorder/deluxe/whatever incentive exclusive summon dlcs. I Genuinly hope those wont be really exclusive but merely "get them earlier than when you unlock them in the game" Summons. Sadly I suspect the worst and It will probably be something along the lines of heavily timegated until free/ free upon release of episode 2 type of
strawberries, or even worse paid micro dlc. This kind of stuff is borderline aggravating.
Reference shots for those who havent seen them yet:
https://23-allgamesdelta.s-ul.eu/fWUV3cAMhttps://23-allgamesdelta.s-ul.eu/vbut4T9vhttps://23-allgamesdelta.s-ul.eu/DbEmsqg6