Yup, releasing a game every year means crap.
That's why IV, V, VI, IX, X, and XI were all utter shit.
(Psst: The secret word here is teams. A company the size of SE can have multiple teams working on differently numbered FF titles at the same time. FFVII and FFXIII were the exception, not the rule. And VII's delay was primarily due to jumping across platforms and difficulty getting it published. While we were playing/looking forward to VIII, X was already in development alongside IX. Pretty sure XI was being drawn up sometime around then too.)
EDIT- I should probably add that this doesn't come off as "we're trying to grab cash" so much as "our fans aren't going to have to wait ~4 more years (or, another way, roughly the span of time from VII to IX/from III to VI) for the next game". It's all in how you read it. To note, they cited a few companies that use the multi-team method to crank out releases. They've also been doing that with the FFXIII "series", although they clearly didn't have this planned out as well as they probably should have. Also, FFXIII-2 has more interesting concepts behind it than XIII did. As I see it, that doesn't mean creativity is impossible on a schedule. So yeah, they're just intending to make games more frequently like they used to.