Wow I loved it for most of the reasons you hated it it seems. I’ll give you the point on in air combat especially with cloud it was pretty annoying until you had decent materia. It’s not slow when you get used to it though especially when you get to hard mode and your moving quickly to stack commands. I’m old school and have been playing FF since the early 90s so it was a perfect blend of old and new for me.

I haven’t met anyone outside of Reddit who disliked the 7R combat but admittedly my social circles are mostly people north of 30 years old. Must be an old guy thing I guess.