I thought the third LOTR movie was brilliant in some respects (Smeagol vs. Sam for the WIN! Smeagol vs. Frodo for the WIN! Ohhh, that music on Mt. Doom!) but they completely mishandled the Witch King of Angmar's awesome entrance into Minas Tirith -- wasn't even in the theatrical release at all -- as well as Eowyn's confrontation with the Witch King, which was always dear to my heart and the beginning of budding feminist leanings for me. Eowyn's confrontation seemed geared toward patronizing feminist and pro-feminist leanings taking root in Western society, but contained little of what made Tolkien's presentation of that clash so rich.
That said, I would embrace a third Chrono game as long as Kato did the scenario design and Mitsuda composed; I don't mind if Horii or Toriyama are nowhere to be seen. Zeal has always been the heart of Chrono IMO, making Kato's work on Chrono Trigger the most central.
Kato's triumph with Chrono Cross lies squarely in the fact that he was able to "up the ante" by switching the subject from time travel to a fresh concept. The decision to remove Magus was certainly a blunder, and the fact that Radical Dreamers included Magus fairly unambiguously leads me to believe it was not Kato's preference to do this, and that rather, he was possibly constrained by corporate influences or something.
Crimson Echoes has already shown several ways of "upping the ante" further and proven that there's room for thematic growth in the franchise: exploring the moral repercussions of time travel, and exploring how dimensional travel occurs de facto from the time traveler's viewpoint as a side effect of time travel. The clearest path forward, IMO, is a classic JRPG with a multi-scenario story that unfolds according to the player's decisions or performance throughout the story -- where the player shapes the world's history actively, and in major ways. Plus a Xenogears-style battle system, and giant robots since a futuristic time period is practically a given. Yeaaaahhh.
The big catch-22 is, if a new IP does the aforementioned things, it will be accused of being too much like Chrono, even though the series hasn't addressed the deeper nuances it could with further treatment. This is the source of my personal frustration with Square Enix's decision to let the franchise lie fallow.
