I disagree. As for the meandering, your nostalgia is blinding you to how bonkers Chrono Trigger's story is.
"You turn the corner and you're in a space station now but it's also at the bottom of the ocean and floating up in the sky at all times simultaneously and the guards are knockoffs of this one goofy karaoke cat machine your childhood friend made for some reason, now crash your TARDIS into it so you can go fight cyber god mom before she wakes up the ufo that's using our planet as an egg for the third time, your team is a super Saiyan clone with a samurai sword, the mechanic from dr slump, a cavewoman you abducted, an evil robot with memory loss, cyber god mom's goth son Dracula, tomboy princess and some frog"
The major plot points are "fighting a bridge zombie", "Ozzie's in a pickle", "showing a necklace to some treasure chests", "jailbreak", "oh no time is broken", "genre whiplash", "jailbreak again", "the time machine flies now", "did those two goblins just say by our powers combined", "eyes cream", and "time to kill god x5".
I love Chrono Trigger deeply. But the biggest sin Chrono Cross committed was that they just threw more things at the wall in their nearly identical "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach.

Sidenote: I will fight for Cross's combat system.