am i the only one who absolutely hate the ass smudge filter.
I can assure you that you're not alone. Not in this forum, at the very least.
I understand that some people actually prefer the filtered sprites, which is fine, but developers should always make this an optional feature. I remembered pitchforks were being brought out when Grandia Remastered was released since it has a baked-in bilinear filtering, and rightly so.
Why is Square so adamant making people not buy their games with their prices?
Let me preface that I'm not about to defend Squeenix's pricing policy, but looking at what they've done with this remaster, I can see that there's a fair bit of effort was put into it. Whether that translates to a port which is not scuffed six ways to Sunday and justifies the cost, the jury remain out on that one.
This new remaster features UI improvements, choice between original/orchestrated soundtrack, and fully-voiced cutscenes for both Japanese and English languages which I think where most of the budget goes, since JP voice talents alone does not come cheap.
Having said that, it's totally understandable not to trust Squeenix to actually deliver a good product, since we certainly have seen their share of scuffed PC ports over the years from franchises big and small.
Of course, at the end of the day
“modders will fix it”, but not many people will have the inclination to install mods, let alone spent time troubleshooting their games.