I disagree. I write original stuff more than I write fanfiction. People forget that rarely, if ever, does profit come of fanfiction. So it’s written, bad or good ^^’, entirely out of devotion to the fandom. Now ~that~ is dedicated writing 
and I’ve read fanfiction that blows some original fiction out of the water.
Cheap and easy to use other people’s characters? Obviously you haven’t read any of my original stuff (like S.O.D.O.F.F.), trhe characters there are about as cheap as you can get 
And writing for other people’s characters can be really hard at times, you have to write within certain boundaries without letting your imagination run too wild. The results (as we have oh so often seen) can be quite disasterous. And don;t get me started on the Mary Sues…
Yea, sometimes it’s extremely difficult to write for something I really like just because I can’t get into some of the characters.
I didn’t really get into FF VIII all that much… but I think it could be fun to write something for it just because of the characters. They seemed really open ended to me, like they weren’t really pushed very far in the game… not nearly as far as they could have been developed at least. But heck, I’ll probably get mail bombs for saying that. ^_~\