Disappointed in one Endwalker Aspect [SPOILERS]

[Rosenstrauch]

Except that anyone paying attention would have been under no illusions that we could have changed the past, before sending us back to Elpis Elidibus clearly warns us that we cannot change the past, that it happened and we cannot stop that. I don't know how much clearer the game can be than pre-emptively telling the play we cannot save the unsundered past.

There are three problems with that line of thinking: The first is that everything Elidibus knows about time travel, as far as we know, comes from him studying G'raha's memories. G'raha, the time traveler from a future where we died in the Eighth Umbral Calamity, the First was rejoined to the Source, and he remained sealed within Syrcus Tower for around two hundred years before being woken up and sent back in time for the singular purpose of preventing the very Calamity that did us in. So no, Elidibus should be well aware that the time travelers can change the past.

The second is Elidibus's exact words need to be taken in full to be understood, instead of just quote mining him:

tl;dr: Preventing the Final Days will not save the world we came from, which only exists as a result of the Final Days. Preventing the Final Days would, as far as Elidibus is aware, cause our own world to cease to exist, stranding us in the past. And he'd be wrong, but the only people who could correct him exist in the future G'raha came from, which nobody 1. knows how to contact and 2. has never tried to contact.

The third problem is that, from the quest Travelers at the Crossroads, it becomes abundantly clear that not changing the future is like walking through a minefield blindfolded without so much as a metal detector. Our character is visibly upset and hesitant over being confronted with what we've been hiding, and when we spill the beans to Venat, she promptly concludes that even though we won't be able to change our own past, we can still alter the future of the Unsundered World. Which is correct, given our knowledge of the future G'raha came from: It still exists, unchanged by G'raha's efforts, despite the fact that from our perspective the events the preceded it are no longer possible.

As a corollary to the above, the sheer number of times things in Elpis wouldn't have happened if we didn't get involved is pretty much all of it. Yet we went in with zero foreknowledge of what would happen there. Because of that, shit like "I knew I had to warn X of Y and get Z because I'd seen me do it in the past" doesn't apply. Our choices, from the very beginning to the very end, are our own. And if folks prefer to interpret that as us trying to change the past, then they have every right to do so.