There are a lot of interesting things they could do with magic drawing, though I felt that it was poorly implemented in 8. I wouldn't necessarily miss that though, as much as the ability to customize your statistics so deeply.
As for XII, I might have enjoyed it if I hadn't been playing XI for three years or so before its release. After that point, it felt like they just ported XI very badly into a single-player game. It just seemed to lack all the soul, nevermind the mechanics, of a traditional FF game, regardless of how independently good it might have been. Like many players, I was disappointed that they tried to reinvent the wheel rather than improve upon a well-working concept. It was, basically, a story-less (or story anorexic) dungeon crawler, and didn't even have throwbacks like the classic summons. The gameplay was largely ripped off of XI, the grid system was dumb, gambits, quickenings... really, I can't say that there was much of anything that I particularly liked about the game. Oh yeah, and lest I forget, they made Fran and Balthier perform worse with their native weapons for no damn good reason. And who could forget the stroke of brilliance associated with the Zodiac Spear?
Really did not strike me as worthy of a numeral. I might have thought it was great as a spinoff, part of the Ivalice series that it should have been, but going in expecting the ol' FF experience, I was roundly disappointed at pretty much every turn.