"Does anybody feel that modern RPG's need to become more like Final Fantasy XII?" should have been the thread title.

There are 2 core problems with modern RPGs:

1) Those that try to emulate 8~16 bit RPGs with simplistic battle systems FAIL because they're so slow.

Battles are slower. Fade in, fancy camera work, choose attacks, watch lengthy battle animations, victory pose, battle summary screen, load map... what used to take 30 seconds now takes minutes, and when such repetitive and simplistic actions are drug out that long, it gets to be unbearable.

Story sequences are slower. Most writers are still telling the same contrived story with the same cliched characters... only with larger amounts of text, voice acting, and cinematics. The point is, again, that you can't take something predictable, make it last longer, and expect it to be enjoyable.

2) Those that try to innovate fail to make things more interesting... or: Complexity for complexity's sake. So much time is wasted in menus doing things that should be automatic. Unless Player A has the potential to make something dramatically different from Player B, and unless these differences dramatically alter the way the game is played, there's really no point in giving the illusion of customization. It's time wasted for minimal gain.

Unless the excuse is "Christmas release on a dying system", it's amazing how little fanfare Final Fantasy XII got. A developer finally found a way to eliminate the most repetitive part of RPGs while still allowing the player to intervene in "special" situations, and offered a customization scheme which can allow for a very unique player experience... and nobody noticed. And by "nobody noticed", I mean that years later, we still haven't seen anybody try to take that idea and run with it. If anything, we've seen a complete stagnation of the genre.