The questions I want EW to answer the most: WHY and HOW was the world sundered?

[MikkoAkure]

He's just biased. This is the same society that was going to leave a inhabited island's population to be killed by a volcanic eruption.

The Convocation wanted to evacuate the locals while Azem went against the wishes of the council to help them prevent the destruction instead, since their society had the power but didn't want to use it.

This has two implications:
The first is that not all sentient beings in the ancient world had creation magic like Amaurot. The inhabitants of the island were farmers, not god-magic wielding philosophers.

The second is that Azem has always gone against the flow in a society where up until Zodiark, every last single one of them were completely unified on decision-making. I wonder if Azem's rogue tendencies were a catalyst for Venat and her crew splitting off from the rest to begin with. We already know that Azem wanted nothing to do with Zodiark's summoning and I wonder if they were popular enough in Amaurot that others were willing to follow their example.

Hydaelyn is also the planet, no? Why would a deity/primal based off of the planet itself want to sunder itself to save itself?

Zodiark is the original will of the planet. Hydaelyn basically booted him from his chair and broke him into 14 pieces, 1 for every shard and then the Source, and imprisoned him in the Moon. She then sat down on his chair atop the lifestream and became the new will of the plant.

The debate is whether or not she was right in doing so.

On one side you have the Ascian legal defense team who think that the Ancients were a good and complete society and the Sundering was of no fault of their own and that current life shouldn't exist and that everyone alive today is nothing.

On the other side you have the white knights who think Hydaelyn can do no wrong.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, but right now we only have the side of the story from a few Amaurotines who were tempered by one of those two so I lean more toward Hydaelyn. Knowing what we do of Primals, I'm less inclined to believe that everyone kept sacrificing themselves to Zodiark so he could have the power to work his magic and that after it's all over, he will gladly eat up the donated aether from all the new life on the planet, give everyone back their loved ones, and willingly fade away.

Ramuh and Hydaelyn are the only primals we have seen so far to willingly give up their power and aether and weaken themselves, as they are both programmed that way. But whether Zodiark would actually do the same remains to be proven. They're both just programs and one is programmed to return the world to how it used to be and the other is programmed to protect the new life that came after the first Summoning. Hydaelyn isn't going to go too far out of our way to protect us though, unless it's specifically from Zodiark. As she told us in the game's main theme song: "Thy Life is a riddle, to bear rapture and sorrow. To listen, to suffer, to entrust unto tomorrow".