By 'No new charachters' I do hope they are regarding this RE as a separate entity from the compilation. I felt it really messed with the game's symmetry to have Genesis show up with Sephiroth in the reactor in CC. It takes away from the extremely tight dynamic between Zack, Cloud, and Sephiroth, IMO. I think everything in the compilation so far, while not presented poorly by any means, does appear as fan-fiction, this is likely due to the fact that they accidentally created one of the most memorable games ever with the original haha.
There's a typo in a poem by Nash that reads 'Brightness falls from the air' It was meant to say hair, but this typo cemented it as one of the great Elizabethan lines in Literature.
The original FF7 is kind of like that, it was a great game with a ridiculous marketing campaign, but the fact that it has stayed with us is a testament to the appropriate (and accidental) sensibility it managed to strike in us as players. The Remake, while I doubt it will capture that again, will nonetheless have better chances if they focus less on tying up loose ends with their spin offs and instead put their efforts into polishing all the rough edges the original contained, story and gameplay wise.
That's what I hope 'No New Charachters' means anyways haha