What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[EaraGrace]

...or because the Rejoinings don't necessarily automatically yield ancients. We've seen this from the Source vs the First, where the life forms are more or less indistinguishable barring soul density, and very distant from an ancient. Bearing in mind that amongst the sundered are fragments of ancient souls which they very much would've wanted to restore, like Emet's old pal, Azem. Which makes arguing back from their end result and what would be required at the end of them to restore the ancients, to what would've happened before then when we're talking about vaguely specified "new lives", an exercise in futility. You're free to consider it as evidence of some prior plan but it's not very compelling, IMO.

I think it very compelling. Emet being willing to, and in fact planning on, sacrificing human rejoined souls says much about the lengths they were willing to go to to bring back those they lost. Likewise, you’re free to disregard it or insist that the plan was completely different in the past, but I think most would agree it suggest that more than small animals were going to be sacrificed in Amaurot.

Any mortal, regardless of how good, who openly states they alone will decide the future, is immediately a villain. I admit there are situations where such a statement would not burn a hole in my heart, but this was not one. We barely knew Venat as a mortal, barely knew any of them, and yet we put all of our trust in her.

If the future was to be in the hands of one person of good moral standing vs many people with evil designs, I’d choose the former every time. Not blindly, not without consideration, but if they are still right, then I guess I would choose the villain.

What if she had messed up? What if Zodiark somehow won? What if, what if. Who is she to decide the future of all things for generations to come? Why are we thus robbed of free will? Why were our parents, or our parents' parents, or so on and so forth robbed of their free will? She made the choice and we were forced to accept it.

Many of the things in our lives is this way. We are born into nation states bound with laws we didn’t have a say in, born into circumstances we had no control over. To rage against it is to rage against time itself. The simple truth is the Ancients choose to believe that paradise could be found in Zodiark, and Venat knowing what she knew, had to choose between allowing them to walk that path to oblivion, or intervene.

Make sense? You can believe and accept it if you want. There's nothing wrong with that considering it's the narrative. I won't though. Time travel and man-driven life-creation are huge no-nos in fantasy. Square broke both.

And that’s totally fair. I don’t begrudge those who didn’t like the narrative direction taken.