The Ito love around here amazes me.
I'd be interested to see this happen, since Ito has always had others to lean heavily on during development (Kitase, Sakaguchi, and Matsuno).
The guy is pretty fantastic in the technical elements of the FF games he's been assigned to, but even after 20+ years with the company he's never proven he can lead a FF team on his own. Not sure why everyone considers him such a savior.
You have to consider this - while it's true he has always had help in his directorial roles, 9 and 12 both had these people in a more hands-off role. Sakaguchi was transitioning out of development entirely, and Matsuno obviously left 12 after a period. He is qualified.
For whatever reason, though, when Sakaguchi left Square, he is on the record as saying that he left FF in the hands of Kitase; he talked in one interview of watching Kitase doing what was 'his role' in FFX and FFX-2 and realizing the time was right. Who knows why it wasn't Ito, or the pair as a team.
Unlike most, I'm not going to blindly hate Kitase - I think he's a good and talented developer, but I think Ito serves as the perfect counter-balance to his flaws. FF9 he wasn't there, I admit, and FF9 is still wonderful, but my point still stands. Kitase believes heavily in action-based mechanics, deeper story integration and this 'almost an interactive movie' future. His apprentice Toriyama thinks very similarly, and the result is those two working together to further that cause, pushing those ideas without much thought for the other side of the coin. Ito offers that other side of the coin.
There's a great anecdote in some Japanese ultimania or something for Chrono Trigger. That game was in trouble, and after FF6 both Kitase and Ito were bought over to the game to co-direct and help get it back on track. Supposedly Kitase checked out what there was, and embedded himself fixing the problems that were keeping the game from market - which is absolutely correct to do. Ito, though, saw a different problem - he felt that the game's story was too linear, and featured too much simple 'paging through text' just pressing A repeatedly. He focused his time on injecting more consequence and energy into the story itself, integrating story and gameplay more closely together.
The result was moments like the freedom in the Millenial Fair, and the trial sequence. In the originally intended CT none of that was there, and Crono just went straight to jail. All that weird action/consequence stuff was Ito, and that is absolutely an example of what the man does best - but based on FF12's development, Kitase may well be better at delivering actual product (or maybe not, based on 13 and Versus which, let's not forget, he is still associated with.) Hard to judge.
Anyway, my point is that the best possible outcome for the series would probably be for both of them to be involved... which will probably never happen anyway.