I truly don't understand how anyone can think there was nothing in the game that hinted Hydaelyn was not benevolent. I even did a write-up in another post with bullet points about it. :P Hell, even after EW she's not. She outright says what she did "led to untold bloodshed and suffering" and that there was "no kindness nor justice" in it. I'm not bringing that up to defend her either. The problem isn't Venat/Hydaelyn as much as it is how the rest of the game treats her and her actions. I'll at least give her credit for having the self awareness to acknowledge she's a monster, but nothing else does. This is akin to the player unwittingly assisting Emet with a rejoining and then for the rest of the expansion everything acts as if the situation was the best possible outcome in between you having tender moments with him in cutscenes. If that sounds like something that would outrage you, well, that's how some of us felt about how the sundering and the person responsible for it was handled.
Also, as I noted in yet another post (losing track :P), had Venat always believed the Ancients incapable of dealing with Meteion without being sundered then she wouldn't have bothered trying to get her people to change nor would she have delayed past the second sacrifice to Zodiark. So, even the dynamis defense doesn't check out anymore. It basically boils down to people weren't doing what she wanted them to fast enough so she literally cut them down to size. Not quite how it was depicted in the cutscene though, with her grandiose speech and the 'this hurts me more than it hurts you' pity walk through the ages.
I never realistically thought Hydaelyn would be written as evil, however, I would not have guessed they'd not only make the sundering of everything intentional but in addition to that spend a lot of effort making it seem like it and the perpetrator were in the right the whole time. Venat was in a better moral position in ShB from the biased Ascians' POV! At least then there was question as to whether or not she realized sundering Zodiark would sunder everything, maybe it was accidental. It also wasn't supposed to be an act against her people, it was supposed to be against Zodiark. Now we know she had full knowledge of everything and did it all on purpose, I'm having a lot of difficulty understanding how the writers didn't foresee an issue with some players being morally opposed to the extent of making them BFFs with this character.