Feeling divided about Rebirth's ending

I know I'm a year late but I have just finished Rebirth and I am really confused about if I liked the ending or not, so I wanted to discuss with all of you about the game. I have played Crisis Core but not the OG FFVII (I'll probably play it before Part 3 since I did like Rebirth as a whole). I do know some spoilers (Aerith's Death, some things about Tifa healing Cloud's mind, and the ending). I will also be short in my opinions but I can give much more detail if this post sparks some discussion, I just don't want to make a gargantuan post.

I will mainly focus on the bad in this post but be sure that I'm fully in and invested in the story and I will buy Part 3 day 1. There are many things I like about the game's narrative that we can talk about in the comments but I want to focus on my worries here.

So, after finishing Rebirth, if I had to sum up what I feel about the ending and about Part 3 it would be "Hype", "Excitement", "Fear" and "Worry".

I'll go on with my biggest fear, I think that the ending might have broken the emotional weight of Aerith's death and SE will have a hard time with Part 3. I am a bit confused with the ending, from Cloud taking the fake black materia to Credits. If I understood it correctly, Cloud did manage to save Aerith by creating a parallel timeline/world. The Aerith from our timeline is dead, 100% sure she is, but when he parried Sephiroth a new timeline was created with Aerith and the rest of the group alive. I feel like Aerith's death should have a huge emotional impact and having this sort of multiverse wildcard might undermine all this.

I have been reading that people think that Cloud is even worse, psychologically speaking, compared to OG FFVII and that he thinks our Aerith is alive, I'm not so sure about that. The last dialogue between Cloud and Aerith seemed to me like a sendoff, with how Cloud talks to her he seems to be fully aware that she is dead, but he has more awareness of how the cycle of life works, especially with Cetra, and knows she is safe and well in the lifestream. This links with a thing Aerith said about knowing that your loved ones are on the lifestream. Cloud can also be crazy right now, it is also possible.

Something similar happens to me with Zack, I like Zack, don't get me wrong, I love Crisis Core, but I don't quite see why the writers went out of their way, doing all these multiverse shenanigans, to save Zack from death. After Rebirth, I am more convinced that how Zack is handheld undermined his great death in Crisis Core. If you really think about it, Zack didn't bring anything new to the story and he didn't do much up until the last fight against Sephiroth, was he really needed here for the narrative? Let's see what happens with Part 3.

About the story, I have my likes and dislikes, but I think it was good overall and I liked it. However, I think they did not handle well how they conveyed the main theme of the story. The main theme here is "Walking towards your future, being thankful for the present, and not letting the past hold you up" This is nothing revolutionary and is not even handled in a new way, not giving more depth to the concept. I didn't count it but the characters directly and explicitly said the theme of the story out loud and literally like 6 times (I remember the ritual at Cosmo Canyon where Aerith says it).

I think we have had a huge evolution in storytelling skills in the video game industry these last 3 decades and Rebirth's story feels like a 30-year-old story (which it is). I want to stress that I did like Rebirth's story and enjoyed it very much, just wanted to point this out.

About characters, I'll try to be very brief.

I did not like Sephiroth as a character, Sephiroth for me was this legendary video game character from one of the most important games of all time, Remake and Rebirth, and Part 3 in the future, for me are an opportunity to get to know these characters and Sephiroth didn't sit quite right. I think Sephiroth doesn't have much character, mainly because he is but a puppet of Jenova, mostly thanks to his huge misinterpretation of his origins (I mean he made some huge leaps of logic to conclude that Jenova was his literal mother). I feel like he is a villain who is held up by his presence/"aura" but there is not much more to him than that. He is a legendary soldier, a hero with a good heart who distanced himself from others who went mad and there is nothing more. I might have missed things about the character, if so please let me know, but for now, Sephiroth has been a disappointment to me, don't get me wrong, he has presence and is intimidating, but I expected to see more.

About our main group, I think there are 2 tiers of characters. On the one hand, we have our first-class citizens Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, and Barret (I like all of them, tho I think Aerith is the best with a great margin), and on the other hand, we have our second-class citizens Nanaki, Cait Sith, and Yuffie (I leave Cid and Vincent out since they joined the group late in the story and they did not have much time on screen, I'll wait until Part 3). I did like Nanaki and Cait Sith not because of them being well-built characters like first-class ones, but because of small characterization details that I found entertaining or funny (Cait Sith accent was great in English). I despise Yuffie, she is the worst character in this game (and this game has Palmer), she is a dick to literally everyone 99% of the time and the remaining 1% where she seems to have basic empathy towards others she has to make a quip about her status as materia hunter and lose that glint of being a decent person. She is not a character built to be hated, at least I think she's not, she is very badly written.

Shinra is another disappointing thing, apart from Rufus, Reeve (I treat him and Cait Sith as the same, at least for now), and the Turks (I didn't like nor dislike Elena, she was meh for me and the rest of the Turks are not great characters, at least they have charisma and good dynamics between them). Shinra is so cartoonishly evil that I cannot take them seriously, they are the second biggest enemy of our heroes, I should take them seriously, and see them as a threat but:

• Scarlet acts as a sadistic maniac, even when doing that goes directly against her and the company's interest (I could get into more detail here, the Corel situation was disastrous from Shinra's point of view).
• Heidegger is a military strategist who does 0 strategy.
• Hojo is nothing more than a mad scientist (I know something happens with him in the OF FFVII after the events of Rebirth, maybe he improves).
• Palmer is a Clown.

About Rufus, he is a weird character for me, he is the only competent person on the board of directors and I like how he acts as a strategist both in war and business but I think I did not understand something about his character. The main thing with Rufus is that he wants to be his own person and act differently from his father, have different goals. President Shinra's main goals were reaching the promised land and something akin to "world domination". I was surprised when Rufus' goals were exactly the same as President Shinra's. Again, I think I may have understood something wrong, please let me know.

Again, if there is a discussion about the characters, or you have some questions about my opinions, I can give more details about our first-class citizens or Shinra in the comments.

Finally, let me talk about worldbuilding. If I analyze Gaia's worldbuilding, trying to be objective, I think it is not a big world. I noticed this with side quests and world intel, these pieces of side content should give me new details about the world but I found myself 100% of the time reading or hearing the same concepts that I have heard in the main story just 1 hour ago. For example, if I hear 3 paragraphs about some general evolution of Junon's history in the main story, Junon's intel data will have exactly the same information, this applies to every Lore concept or world's history trivia you can think of.

However, this doesn't make a shallow world or bad worldbuilding, maybe not the deepest. The world is fun, varied, full of unique characters, and, most importantly, it has identity, it is unique, I cannot think of any world similar to this one (although their separate concepts can be seen in other pieces of media). This is what made the world click to me and I think it is the best part of the whole game.

So, just to sum up, I have a lot more things to say but the post is already too long, I wanted to discuss the ending and I ended up babbling about everything else. What do you think about the ending, Aerith's Death, and Zack's role in all of this, are you 50/50 like me or not?