As a huge fan of Final Fantasy I say the blame is not in the technology but in Square-Enix and the fans. The fans are to blame because the majority are to busy clinging onto Final Fantasys IV, VI and VII to even care about the newer ones as much and some of them care too much about the graphics. I'm in neither of those mind you and Square-Enix is to blame because they let the key people involved in Final Fantasy walk out the door years ago. On top of that they don't listen to fan feedback very often and are dumping tons of money into broadening the audience and spreading themselves thin in the process. I think Square-Enix should consider bringing back the Final Fantasy main franchise back to Nintendo to save some money on overall development cost or go back to stylised designs and forget realism to once again save money and also get some better writing staff because XII and XIII story wise weren't very good in comparison to the previous entries and cut back on the cutscenes.
I personally want the next Final Fantasy to have stylised art design with a well fleshed out story, a fair few short cutscenes when relevent, either turn based combat with full control of the party(prefered) or Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep style of combat with customisable AI partners like KH1&2, a 60 hour story with actual sidequest that aren't monster hunts, a world that actually evolve during the course of the story like previous Final Fantasys and finally bring back the job class system but allow anyone to equip anything but have penalties for equipment that isn't normally used by the class eg. a speed penalty for a Black Mage wielding a single handed katana unless their subclass is ninja or samurai.
I know I ask for WAY to much but that's my dream Fanal Fantasy, especially if it was made by Mistwalker and Hironobu Sakaguchi.
Maybe Square-Enix should give up on Final Fantasy and sell the franchise to Mistwalker.