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

[Lauront]

I was more referring to his inability to deal with Zenos and to finish off the WoL in SB. Zenos, in particular, seems to be the reason why Black Rose was never deployed in our current timeline, which has caused me to wonder if he exists in the 8UC. As far as ShB, agreed, but that whole expansion was about the WoL getting gifted with 'get out of jail free' cards. Emet was an assured win had it not been for the Ardbert merger and Elidibus was an assured win had it not been for Emet's intervention.

Ah I see. Particularly given Elidibus's primal aspect (although a 5.3 thing), it did sit rather strangely that he did not leverage that to gain more power, but I suspect it wasn't really planned out that early and instead was retrofitted. Regarding Zenos, my suspicion is Emet-Selch may have simply removed him from the equation if he posed a threat to their plans, if Black Rose itself did not, since he'd have little to keep him on the First. On the other hand, we saw how Zenos's motivation drained without the WoL as a sparring partner, so it's not inconceivable that, depending on the order of events, something similar happened in the 8UC, as well.

[Rulakir]

Regarding Zenos, my suspicion is Emet-Selch may have simply removed him from the equation if he posed a threat to their plans, if Black Rose itself did not, since he'd have little to keep him on the First. On the other hand, we saw how Zenos's motivation drained without the WoL as a sparring partner, so it's not inconceivable that, depending on the order of events, something similar happened in the 8UC, as well.

I can't help but feel Zenos got the shaft in the same way that Garlemald and the Ancients did. There were a lot of aspects about him that led to nothing or were hand waved away in the Q&A LL. It seems like for whatever reason they wanted to be done with all of the previous storytelling and move onto something new and it had better be worth it.