What is with the constant mistreatment of the Garlean story?(6.1 Patch spoilers)

[TheMightyMollusk]

I kind of get the feeling that the writers just never had a plan for resolving the Garlemald conflict in the first place. They were supposed to be a monolithic empire with nigh-unstoppable technology, who hadn't conquered Eorzea entirely yet only because they were too busy putting out fires elsewhere to bother. Unfortunately, the resolution for the entire war is.....Zenos and Fandaniel.

It's a shame, because the Empire was always interesting....when it wasn't the main focus. Post-ARR, I liked getting glimpses of it. Things like Varis taking the crown, Regula's appearances in the Warring Triad story, the small stuff that built up the weight and threat of Garlemald. But then Stormblood happened, and thanks to Zenos's apathy, the Empire started to look like a joke. All the nuance of the Empire goes out the window so we can follow a dead-eyed sociopath.

Maybe if we'd had more interesting Imperial characters in the spotlight, it might've gone differently. For every Zenos or Valens, we've had a Gaius or Regula. (And Eorzea's hardly without its own slimeballs. Teledji Adeledji, Thordan and the Heavens' Ward, Ilberd.....the list continues.) But the writers just didn't seem to have enough interest to do much with it, so we got a rushed and rather unsatisfactory conclusion to one of the story's big conflicts.

[Brinne]

As far as the question of "Is Garlemald unpopular?" is concerned, one data point of interest might be that NHK poll that really put Emet-Selch on the map:

https://www.nhk.or.jp/anime/ff/ranking/?cat=series

Among the FFXIV characters, the only Garleans who ranked at all were Zenos and Asahi, who is a meme character in Japan. Keep in mind Minfilia, generally acknowledged as a very unpopular character, managed to rank near the very bottom.

[Nilroreo]

I kind of get the feeling that the writers just never had a plan for resolving the Garlemald conflict in the first place.

Perhaps this was done to wash their hands of their last major remaining link to 1.0 and all the baggage that came with it. Linking their origins to the Ascians already seemed like a not so subtle attempt to kill two birds with one stone.