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

[Lauront]

It's worth noting that the 2 week delay just prior to EW release was for knock-on QA work to be done after further work was done to tie up "loose" ends to do with the story (see here - they discuss it here). This is very vague, and while it does sound like the decision to compress this came sooner (and even so, Ishikawa had concerns about this as she felt she had material for 7.0 and possibly even up to 8.0, and was worried about whether she'd be able to manage this time compression), this does suggest more rewrites past that point. The expansion (usually planned to release every 2 years, so around June 2021) was delayed over and above the time they said they'd need to account for COVID as well, which we could put at around 3-4 months. Whilst we can all only speculate, I don't think what Anhaato is proposing is at all implausible - bearing in mind, it would've not been during that 2 week period but before. That added time was to get the QA up to scratch.