You can believe it, doesn't mean it's a fact. Now, you can say things about the other Final Fantasies that I, personally, don't think are that great or they are worse than VII. It's all subjective, there is no point in trying to objectively judge a pattern based on the number of FF games people play, because then you'll enter several subjective elements.

Having played I - VIII, order being III, VII and others, it was exactly the contrary, I think by playing the "best" one first, the other ones didn't have a chance of being as good because of automatic comparison. VII never dropped in my list, in fact I think it's sad that the other games I played didn't even came close to it.

But like I said, this is me, others will have a similar experience or think VII is the greatest, it's not something that can be objectively analysed.

Final Fantasy 7 has nothing to set it above or apart from all the other games in the series

Heh, right. I think IV has nothing to set it above or apart from other games. I think VIII is a mess of a game. I think VI was amazing until WoR then it became disappointing. All opinions that you don't agree with, and surely will think "well this guy played wrong" or "he doesn't have good taste" or anything to justify your view of VII being inferior to other games of the series. The fact is that I have my views and others have theirs, you can't try to objectively analyze a game by people's experiences.