You are right about that, I would have to say that the FF games after the merger were ok, though not as good as the games before the merger, and Star Ocean got the short end of the stick (You shoudl be glad that you could not play it, it was an imbarassment compared to Star Ocean: The Second Story, and that game was using sprites....

but yeah, if they had not merged we would most likely have much higher quality games right now... I wonder what they did that caused the games to go so badly...