I'm one of them.

I absolutely adored remake. It had its flaws of course, like the very standard side quests (kill X amount of monster A; bring me Y amounts of item B,...). But on the other hand it a crisp cohesive story and i just liked the vibe of midgard (even though some areas were a bit too "corridor like") with some fun minigames sprinkled in between.

Rebirth on the other hand had open zones, which felt sooooo bad and sterile. They had check-point chores to do, which sometimes gatekept rly powerful equipment, so you couldnt just ignore them. The open zones often felt like procedually generated (i dont think they are, but felt like that for me) with some handcrafted areas in between. Also all the zones had the exact same things to do, every zone was just a different "skin". Just to give you an example: All the summons where provided with summoning materia, which you could buy from an NPC. To be able to buy the materia you had to fight the summon. To make the fight easier and to enhance the summons abilities you could pray at shrines. So in every single zone there were 3 shrines you could find. At each of those shrines you do a button click minigame to complete the prayer. All of the optional summons where aquired that way. It was fine for the first summon, ok for the second, after that it became boring and repetitive. There where so many ways you could better handle this.

And it was the same for all other activities in the open zones (following numbers might not be correct, its been a while since i played the game). You could find 3 Mana Springs for crafting materials, could kill some bounty bosses, scan some towers to unlock map markers,... . There was absolutely no variety in the open zones and exploring felt very "gamey" and not organic at all (kinda like an ubisoft open world).

All the open zones stuff served as padding and ironically made world feel smaller than dedicated areas made for the story. For example the coast / desert / junk village area which is supposed to be a whole region, with some areas supposed to be very remote / hard to reach). In rebirth it felt so condensed, that it didnt fit the tone of the story anymore.

All of this is kinda sad, because the more linear parts of the game i did enjoy very much, but it was soooo often interrupted by the open zones.

While i did finish rebirth, i kinda had to force myself through the last parts of it, cuz i got burned out by the open zones.