Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
The big flaw of the Crystarium is that ultimately is more a structural one; it's a civilization that only works if every single person is doing exactly their assigned part, honestly and selflessly. Pretty much all the Facet questlines show how the infrastructure of the entire city is exceptionally bad at handling even things as minor as stubborn older workers, and it crashes into the MSQ when a huge amount of the workforce wants to quit and go be heroes.
I'm not so sure that's true. Any system will have issues if people are being actively uncooperative, and throughout the Facet quests and even people leaving their jobs to pursue heroism the Crystarium doesn't really face crisis, it's merely less efficient than it could be. This is very far from a "dark shadow".

Nym and Amdapor run into a different problem in that they haven't really gotten enough focus to really call out their flaws, but with Amdapor the implication is very loud that they were the ones that actually caused the Sixth Umbral Calamity; be it intentional or not, they were the ones that set off the Elementals, and their implied contact with Sin Eaters is a concern too. With Nym their weird perfection actually does bother me, but the implication does appear that Nym was the side most ready to fight such a war (they just didn't expect it to be so asymmetrical), which casts some aspersions about their intentions.
With Amdapor, we have no strong reason to think ill of them. At most we can say that through the timey nature of the rift they glimpsed Sin Eaters and make some guardian statues in their likenesses - The Elementals weren't even the cause of the Calamity, that was merely a misconception on the part of the survivors it seems. And Nym is even less dubious, we cannot simply say that because they had good tacticians in their ranks that they were some warlike culture. Just the opposite, we lack evidence for them even engaging in battle beyond defending their island.

The dragons are easy: stupidly temperamental and with a perilously long memory. It's not just Nidhogg's rage; it's Hraesvelgr's depression, and even Tiamat's grief. Not only do they hold on to their emotions for insanely long, but they're so powerful that they rarely have reason to listen to those smaller than them.
I would say that this is hardly them being written with some dark societal flaw, it's literally just their biology and perception of time. Also they seem to have no issue with listening to others, it's merely that the betrayal which in their eyes was very recent has led some of them to be disinclined towards heeding empty words. And in the course of Heavensward that's all reversed anyway.

They don't write a civilization without some form of dark shadow somewhere on it. Especially because, as quoted by Theodoric, they don't want to write pure 'good-versus-evil' anymore; since they wouldn't have written Amaurot as purely good, where are the flaws in its perfect facade?
I'm not saying Amaurot was purely good, but again there is a huge gap between that notion and "they deserved it". Moreover, the story isn't Amaurot vs anyone and even it's last remnants in the Ascians are basically already done for, so what sense does it make to retroactively write Amaurot to be far darker after the only people that would care about it's image are already dead? If the story isn't supposed to just be "good versus evil", then writing what has already been preconceived as the evil side for years to be more evil after they're already done for is doing nothing but propping up a black-and-white dichotomy without even being able to leverage the drama of doing so because it can't be held up to the faces of anybody it's relevant to.