Well, it's no secret I wasn't the target audience for just about anything in EW from the themes to the main story arc. I'm agnostic on a good day. I believe life is a series of dice rolls that can't be controlled for or predicted, which is why bad things happen to good people and vice versa. As such, I would've found someone actively trying to carve a different path yet inadvertently leading to the same outcome more compelling.

Destiny only works if yours is positive. Telling someone they're destined to fail at every endeavor and die penniless and alone is significantly less 'romantic'. I understand faith as a necessity to deal with the struggles of life, but what we got wasn't a happy story. It still resulted in the obliteration of the parent civilization, the destruction of numerous worlds, apparently the extermination of tens of thousands of souls based on the scope of the blasphemies in Thavnair alone. Etheirys was "saved" but not only at a multi-apocalyptic cost, but one that was arguably unnecessary in the first place. Just because the WoL and Scions came out unscathed (as usual) didn't make it a feel good ending.