Sundering stuff established in the Q&A

[Lucida3b]

It seems it would have been mostly 'taking the fuel out of the tank and putting in some different fuel' so to speak

Which i find a tad dissappoint, to me it in ShB it sounded more like Zodiark was so powerful he would've been able to alter reality to just reconstitute the souls themselves from aether or something.

Honestly I found some of the elaborations disappointing on him, like it sounds like he just put a curtain of aether over the planet as a shield then 'altered the laws of the star' as they described it.

[Cleretic]

It seems it would have been mostly 'taking the fuel out of the tank and putting in some different fuel' so to speak

I think ultimately, this would have had to happen. Zodiark needs those people to fuel himself, so regardless of the stated requirements of the plan, to keep Zodiark around and capable you do need to give him replacement fuel. ...a lot of replacement fuel in this case.

And when you remember that the person who explained Zodiark to us was Emet-Selch, who probably didn't understand the overall mechanics of Zodiark himself let alone feel the need to explain it to us, and it makes complete sense. As we learned in the Studium Fisher quests, Zodiark laying down that shield of aether actually did cause significant changes to the ecosystem. But much like how what we first thought was Hydaelyn's plan turned out to be Hydaelyn's Plan B, or the sound the Ancients ascribed to the End of Days being just another symptom rather than a cause, the stated effect of Zodiark ended up being a side-effect rather than the direct intention.

Honestly, it's something I really like about the Ancients' story, there's a common trend of the first interpretation of things we get (either from others or by our own deduction) turning out to be from the wrong angle. The facts we get aren't wrong, they're just not telling as much of the whole story as we assume. ...which makes me wonder what facts about Pandaemonium we're looking at from a completely wrong direction right now.