Quote Originally Posted by LineageRazor View Post

The analogy to bugs is a good one, but even with those in mind, the major tasks the Ancients desired of Zodiark (stop the destruction of the world, revitalize the world, restore those sacrificed) were likely capabilities the Ancients intended to include. They built Zodiark to those specifications. Bugs would show up in more minor ways; for example, I'm willing to acknowledge that Tempering could have been a glitch caused by a panicky Convocationeer hoping Zo would have some way to control the folks who kept crapping out horrific demons by accident, even if I consider it to be at least as likely to have been a calculated and intentional feature. But for the big stuff, yeah, the Ancients knew what Zodiark could do. There was no guesswork involved.
But ancients are not perfect and can make mistakes (quite easily if they are not fully concentrated). Seeing how they seemingly waited quite a bit until Zodiark was summoned (as in: until it was at their city) its really not that surprising if panic and other emotions were running high and thus mistakes were made.

The short story also points out how they had no idea how souls are made.

Also I am still not sure how these souls would even still exist or be able to be taken out. The whole point of that sacrifice imo was to give them immense power by giving them their souls as battery. Shouldnt he have used them up? Also if they already had planned about getting those souls back (which in turn would make Emets "would your people sacrifice themselves for others"-speech, ring very hollow since then it would have never been a true sacrifice anyway)why are they still talking about this as a solution afterwards? Shouldnt that have been solved beforehand? Because seemingly Hythlo makes it sound like that idea was only talked about afterwards but if it was their plan the whole time that does not make much sense.