>>723675494
Most of it was covered in some game mags at the time, this link has the book I'd read about most of it in: https://archive.org/details/GamefanVolume5Issue09September1997/
FF7 was more or less the start of Square tweaking games for other territories and then re-releasing them in Japan as International/Final Mix copies.

>>723675473
Yes, and it offered a revamped Sphere Grid and included a post-game epilogue that served as a prologue to X-2 as well. Those were added as an apology because the PAL release was so long after the other territories.