I greatly enjoyed FF8, and when I got my hands on FF7 later, I couldn't get into it and stopped before the first disk was done.
I don't think the problem is that the water temple is hard, it's that if you don't go to the right place at the right moment, you generally have to spend 10-15 minutes navigating past all three water-raising and lowering spots (putting your heavy boots on and off a bazillion times) to be able to try again.
And the Yeti's home level in Twilight princess was the absolute nadir of that game. It had a narrative coherence problem before, but this was the moment when the devs said 'screw it' and flushed the entire epic and serious world they seemed to want to build down the toilet in favor of trapping around a completely nonsensical dungeon because it's owners can't remember where they left the Mac guffin.