I don't think he dropped off hard. If you really liked him, you'd probably still like a bunch of the music he has been making recently. I mean I played Lost Odyssey and while there were more stinkers (like, boring) tracks on that than say final fantasy VI, both games had the same kind of pop-epic sound to them alot of the time. The music all has the same structure, it always had, you know? I mean the only reason people think the Final Fantasy X soundtrack kind of sucked in comparison to VII or whatever was because X was recieved worse as a whole. The music is all the same and if you like the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack there's no real reason to say his later stuff just plain SUCKS cos yeah maybe his music veered in a kind of odder direction at times on Lost Odyssey there were just as many of those claaasssic Nobuo Uematsu tracks. All you can really say is the later stuff isn't to your taste or, more likely, isn't drenched in nostalgia.
I used to really like listening to his music when I was a kid, but it's all just kind of nauseating now. Mostly, anyway, there are a few tracks here and there which are still pretty cool but mostly it's all the same kind of stuff.
have you ever tried makin' out while listening to that?
I load up a hand-drawn anime pic of Tifa, put on "Tifa's Theme" and then I just go ahead and lick my LCD monitor and that's me for a couple hours.