Yeah, I think it would've been a bad call as well.
The major character deaths in the FF7 canon - Zack in CC and Aeris in the OG - are framed by boss fights before and after, respectively. In the former case, it's a devastating meditation on death from the player's perspective, as the mechanics you have mastered during your time living as Zack fail on you, and you finally succomb to exhaustion, your wounds, and a sense of hopelessness and grief that we'll all experience for ourselves one day. To quote Liz Lochead, "everything all smashed and skail'd forever." It's, uh, DARK.*
The other death happens to a loved one, while the player is in a passive state (watching a CG cutscene) and powerless to do anything about it. In this instance, the grief is immediate, shocking. The boss fight is our avenue for expressing the wealth of emotions that flood into us by a surprise death (I, for one, gave JENOVA-Death everything I had!). In both cases, the game holds space for the player to process.
Party members getting exploded left right and centre would add urgency and stakes LIKE NOBODY'S BUSINESS, which is why I think that in another game it would be awesome (I'm sure it happens in shooter games sometimes) but since the parachute sequence functions to lead us into a gauntlet of dungeons rather than lead us to a meditation on death (and, by necessity, a meditation on life) it is at best inappropriate and at worst insensitive. We are all touched by death. For a game about life, it's characters deserve better than to be swatted for the sake of urgency.
*Although I think that Zack getting swatted in the OG was moving in a different sense, and I hope they keep his death much the same as the OG in the remake. If not for anything else, to let Crisis Core keep it's main selling point.
