I have some friends who feel the same way. On the other hand, I was a prejudice little shit who didn’t know anything about rpgs, so I always dismissed them for having “bad graphics” /tiny sprites, so FF7 was my first and I was like “no one told me these are cool story games!!”
Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly it was that turned me off about FF7 at the time. It was visually very dark and felt kind of claustrophobic because of the pre-rendered backgrounds. It still has a lot of the FF series wackiness to it and I've come to appreciate it more with time.
As someone who resented games jumping from beautiful SNES 2D art to really assy-looking 3D on N64 (& later the jump to better but brown muddy "realistic" 3D), I get this. And yeah, the palette in FF7 was very dark, particularly the first Midgar parts of the game.