That's the most common misconception that has been propagated by people that want to justify those changes.
Final Fantasy has always been about turn-based combat.
From Final Fantasy 1 up to 13 it has always been turn-based.
Oh, this one has espers, this one has a job system, this one has materia, this one has sphere-grids, this one has three-character parties, this one you can swap characters during battle?
Whatever, it's turn-based. All that is just a different spice on top of the same idea.
Final Fantasy was never radical as people claim. It didn't went from RTS to turnbased to a first person shooter to a kart racing game.
It had simple variations of the same combat design philosophy (i.e. turn-based).
Anything ACTUALLY radical became a spin-off (i.e. tactics game, crystal chronicles, my life as a king, dissidia, chocobo's dungeon)
And then, on top of the combat it had great music, great characters, great story.
You can see that those people CARED about quality. They were not simply chasing numbers and market trends.
They were DEFINING market trends, which is what OTHER japanese companies are doing now (e.g. Nintendo, Capcom)
Square-Enix is just interested in numbers now. It doesn't matter if they have to kill Final Fantasy's identity and do something else entirely with it.
They only care about Final Fantasy as in name, because the name can be easily marketed. So, they can do whatever they want with the name without caring about what it used to represent.
Typical corporate way of thinking.