The Ascians had a story before 5.0: it was just bad. The writers spent four prior releases setting up "generic bad guys doing generic bad guy things", and held fast to that direction until deciding to pivot towards "but what if they actually had good-ish reasons?". It sucks that we only got one full expansion to develop them as true characters, but that's SE's fault, and it doesn't erase the stuff before it or the idea that it was probably past time to move on from them.
