A lot of games in the early generations were just poorly made. This is a time when the industry was manned primarily by just programmers. Games today are more of an art form and undertaking involving not only graphic artists (yay, pretty...) but designers (whose concern is making the game playable and fun) in addition to the programmers (who make it all function). Most remakes, at least that I've seen, usually are just graphically changed and maybe localized (dialogue fixes, culturally-understandable inside-jokes, etc) while the gameplay remains unchanged.
One of my instructors referred to Mega Man 2 as "the game that taught us all how to platform". Similar things can be said about a lot of games in that era as they were tuned for difficulty based on the creators' level of skill rather than a new player's, making them needlessly difficult and usually under-rewarding. As a new player won't know the inner-workings, shortcuts, or having spent half a year playing the game during its development, it's easy to see how they're facing a much more difficult game than its developers.
But, given that there was a magnificent chasm of lacking alternatives back in the day of the original Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior, there is indeed a tendency to have overly positive nostalgia about them. Lack of alternatives tends to make the available ones more precious in quite a lot of markets or industries.
Abridged version: Yes to the last one.
