[quote name='blueshinra']Eidos used to poach the server bandwidth of a programmer who made a patch that kept the game from crashing at a certain point; they directly linked to the patch from their support pages without any warning. This person is also the author of asset viewers and save file editors for FFVII PC and FFVIII PC, and hosts forums that are well-known to many modders of those games.
Meanwhile, Square Enix is
suspected of including a fan patch with the copy of FFVIII PC that's sitting on Steam's servers without so much as giving a heads-up to the original creator.
I'd say they're well aware of the FFVII/FFVIII modding scene...[/QUOTE]
With that said back to my original point, if they are aware of it and are using it for their own devices, then what purpose would it serve to stop the fan mod if it fixes their broken, glitchy version. So again my point they wouldn't stop the mods since as you put it they blatantly steal (and package) them anyway to fix their product.
I've owned the game since release on PC, and yes it was a freakin' broken nightmare to get running, I still have my original correspondence letter from Eidos on how to fix the issue with Direct Show and the movies crashing, which was super fun back in the day when I couldn't play after putting in 40+ hours at that point in the game. Been meaning to try some of these fan mods personally, but after 300+ hours playing the game, I really don't care to mess with it anymore.