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

[Rulakir]

the funeral quest alone made me tear up because I was happy to have been able to share something new with them and see how excited they were to use it in the future, only to remember that these people would be killed soon, there was no future.

This is why I don't understand Pandemonium. We're saving them from what exactly only for them to still perish in the Final Days (or by our hand in the future)?

To then completely 180 on that and try to imply that the Ancients were doomed from the start and there was no way they ever could have survived due to this contrived unwillingness to change, well it left a very bad taste in my mouth. "Humanity wins because humanity" is a very tired message and given the scope of the world we have here, it felt pretty self-serving. Some of that nuance I loved so much was sadly diminished.

It doesn't make any sense. Ishikawa wanted to "humanize" the Ascians. Rather than Echo flashbacks, we're sent to mingle among the Ancients of Elpis. The whole experience is orchestrated to connect us to them and then we're supposed to believe the strawmen group in Venat's cutscene were representative of their entire civilization as a whole?

Watching the end of dungeon cutscene with Hermes, he says: "If he can learn to value all life and retain his will to live, even should his end be justified, he will surely find a way to avert his demise." First, the Ancients did that, they averted their demise. Second, the sundered don't value all life, not even close. The people who arguably passed the test were still failed by Venat. The people who didn't thematically pass the test are lauded as the winners.

This game has an unpleasant trend of blaming the victims of awful circumstances whilst praising those who have every advantage as 'heroes' when they barely endure any similar or meaningful struggles in their own lives by comparison.

What would we do without rich teenagers telling us how we should be living our lives though? :P

It's interesting, in SHB Emet even states their palette of emotions may be broader than that of the sundered:

I still love his line in ENG: "Well, rest assured that if your heart can be broken, then so can mine!"