Personally I still think the Sundering was straight up genocide. It makes zero sense for the different races all to evolve exactly the same on all the shards. For there to not even be a whiff of legend about the ancients unless the sundering actually killed them all and all venat did was put their torn apart souls into creation concepts. Which is also why she calls us "Her Children" and why in the final days2 it was people who were corrupted rather then the ancients creations. Essentially while aetheric density does make it harder, the reason people were corrupted so easily was simply due to the fact that they are the descendents of beings given form with creation magic. As to why the races are so different. Venat just used the existing concepts. I know YP has pretty much ruled this out. But its what i think makes the most sense.

I also think Venats "fly my childrenand never look back" in the moon ship plan was doomed to fail from the start. The moment that ship left the fading protection of Zodiarks influence, they would all have started turning, trapped like rats with no escape.

I still think Zodiark was done dirty i never wanted him to become the big bad we had to fight. But i do think it would have been a nice twist to actually release and speak to the god and learn it was as emet had always said, a saviour. (It kinda still is this but its so poorly done that its often lost due to the other stuff happening)