Can't we accept that FF9 is a pretty good game overall, but its battle speed, transitions and the way it wastes the player's time at every opportunity are absolutely catastrophic?
Yes and no. A complete absence of loading in and out of battles in every PS1 FF would be great, and turning off cinematic attack animations is welcome just like it is when you get tired of critical kill cam in modern Fallout games.
That, and it's from that era and genre where every few steps you're annoyed by random battle until you get over it. It is extra painful in that era due to the battle transitions especially. Every JRPG should have been Chrono Trigger after Chrono Trigger, but almost none of them are... splitting hairs between PS1 FF's is just that.
I agreed that flexibility is nice earlier ITT, but I think there's a lot more to balancing an experience's overall pace and feel than just providing instant gratification for everyone at every opportunity. The last thing I want is for everything to be made like DRPG's with static images, zero animations or flair for anything, total streamlining between experiencing the environment in a clean, digital manner and offloading battle into that immediate sense of purposeful, tactile mobility... so that not even steps are "wasting my time" - with a narrative, aural and aesthetic experience boring enough to match it, so as not to be dissonant or distracting.
If someone wants to mod the game to be what they want, great, go for it. If people are going to start trying to make the FF they don't like the current red headed step child for awhile, with a bunch of nitpicky selective reasoning, the people who aren't so particular about "muh favorite FF" are likely going to pipe up and disagree. Especially with the "stockholm syndrome" choir coming out of the woodworks in here.