Did they want the Ancients to survive and thus get rid of the future we know?
Hello, brand new to the forums here--please bear with me as I learn to use them. Actually pretty much made my account for the express purpose of replying to this.

Yes--this is exactly what I wanted. My primary interest in the story from day 1, and I've been here for a very long time, has been the Ascians, and I only joke that I've liked them longer than the Garleans because Lahabrea showed up on screen before Gaius did. I have little to no interest in the present-day section of the story, and from a moral sense I regard the Sundering as a bad thing. I was specifically excited headed into EW to see WoL taking up their legacy as Azem and figuring out a way to restore the world that did not involve such harsh methods as the Ascians employed, and instead I'm seeing the story argue that the broken state of the world is just fine, actually! Not a problem with this at all, nothing to see here, go back to your workaday lives in rejection of the idea that society could be better and more highly evolved than it is.

All of the characters I had any interest in at all are dead. I guess I'm going back to being a hardcore raider whose only interest is prog, as I was in WoW before moving to this game in 2013.