*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[Alenore]

At least to me, the whole point is that Amaurot wasn’t a perfect society, and neither were the other ones. I was under the impression that Amaurot and some of the other cultures we’re shown sought perfection but lost their way and went too far to turn back.

Amaurot ended up the same way. A member of their society used their god-like powers of creation to create something he barely understood and gave it vague orders that went completely out of his control. When he realized he screwed up, he wiped the memories of himself and those in power who could do something about it. Then when the problem came back to bite them, they couldn’t comprehend it and decided to cull half of their population and half again to cover up the problem and to re-seed life on the planet and were about to cull that too in order to bring back everyone sacrificed and then continue their society like nothing bad happened while their can of worms wreaked havoc across the stars.

Edit:

Before you pin this all on Hermes, he was broken by the fact that his people pop souls into monsters that they want to add to the ecosystem for no good reason except for the fact that they can. And these monsters are routinely tested in a lab and destroyed if they have undesirable and unforeseen problems. He let his own creation go to test whether or not his people even have a right to continue on, and it wasn’t until after we were depowered and humbled that we were able to prove ourselves and pass the test without sweeping the problem under the wrong and Emet-Selch admitted it.

What part of that sounds like a perfect world?

It may not be a perfect society, but is the sundered Source a better one?
You pin Meteion on them, as if they even knew she existed: Hermes made sure to clean their memories and give them no chance about it. The Convocation wasn't playing the same game as Meteion.

Besides, they had the answer to Meteion's question: they would sacrifice what they needed in order to make sure they survived, and sacrifice again a sizeable part of their society, in order to bring life back to their world. They didn't kill themselves out of despair, they pushed through it, and meant to then sacrifice a part of the life they had brought back, in order to rejoin with the ones who volunteered.
That was their answer, and the one Emet even gave himself when we summoned him before Dead Ends: "You will not end our journey! That is our answer! The answer of all lives on Etheirys, past and present!".