It's good to know there are more people today willing to challenge Masato Kato's claims to CT. He's usually been touted as the irrefutable final word on the storyline, even though the celebrated script in CT was clearly the result of a team effort. I'm pretty sure his original ideas for Zeal were mostly transferred into his writing for Chronopolis, since that place was stuffed with a lot of the same tangential theories and dialogue that Zeal teased at.
I don't want to get too deep into my thoughts on Cross, but one thing that's always annoyed me about it is how good it could have been. There are really interesting story elements in it that I think would have made for a fantastic sequel, even without a lot of the stuff we enjoyed in CT. Unfortunately, Kato's vision was way too overblown, and in the end, I think a lot of his ideas probably would have been better suited for a standalone game instead.