1) The game has essentially been rebooted since July 2012, when Tabata took over. Nomura was the creative director for two years before he got the boot.
2) Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion man. I see plenty of people point to FF as a paragon for story in video games. I don't think it's great, but it surely is to most people, especially for the non-FFXIII games.
3) Naora is one of the best people that SE has. He only oversaw FFXIII. Heck, two of the few characters he designed for the sequels were Caius and Noel, and those two were fan favourite designs.
4) You do realize that FF games are stuck in prototyping a long time before they're revealed, right? They didn't just announce FFXIII and start developing the game then. The game was a PS2 game as far back as 2004. We haven't even gotten confirmation of when VSXIII started development. That game has a messed up timeline but it wasn't even in active development for an exceedingly longer time compared to FFXIII.