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

[Rulakir]

You act as though the EN writers are deliberately obfuscating parts of the story in order to spite the players and they're sneaking it in without anyone knowing and perverting the "original Japanese holy text".

Not spite, incompetence.

[Midareyukki]

Not spite, incompetence.

Incompetence implies that the translation is poor and by people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Either because they're amateurs or because the employees are tone-deaf and don't get what their target culture wants.

The truth, however, is far more nuanced and complex than that.

The gist of it is: this isn't a simple translation. I'd be hard-pressed to call it one. As mentioned before, Koji Fox is in charge of making the lore, he has power during the game's development. And what he essentially did was re-write the story for the EN audience. We're getting our own version of the game. We're getting the major notes of the original, but the nuance changes.

It's more than just translation, because the context and the text is being changed.
It's different from localisation, as it implies stuff is being changed for the sake of the target audience. And it's not, not always.
There's creative liberty, which is really rare in Translation.

Translators in general believe that they must work as close to the source text as possible, but rendering it comprehensible and natural to the reader. A direct translation is too artificial, a loose translation is too creative and can be dangerous in official situations. So when they make a change, normally they do it to better fit what your language and culture will be more used to. Either nuance is lost because "not everything can be translated", or the message's tone is changed a bit to convey it as much as possible, even if distorted.
You will find those changes everywhere: they are normal.

Translators don't rewrite the plot, it's not common to do that.
If there's rewriting involved, such as due to tabboo or sensitivity filter, it's either done by the editor, or the translator asks the author\publisher about it and does so with their approval.
Creative freedom doesn't go beyond that. A product is someone else's job, you're just there to change the labels and make it official in your country.

What this team did was take the game and its script and make their own version. The script is similar for the most part, but nuance, jokes and tone are entirely at their mercy. And Koji is involved in the direction the original takes, so all he has to do is tell his team and say "alright, the JP version's out, let's make this cooler for the EN version". And as he only speaks English, the DE and FR version don't go through this, and thus aren't affected.

Rewriting isn't a translator's job. Calling it "incompetence" is valid if you think "this is a bad translation" without considering that this isn't a translation at all. If this were one, yes, this isn't professional. But the way they go about it isn't the same. It's Localization + Extra steps, approved by SE itself.

So for better or for worse, this is what our localization team does, and SE agrees to it.

It might not even matter much, but as a translator, it really bothers me that the first thing people do is blame the messenger. When often there's stuff our higher ups decide and we just have to take it. It might even be fun for the localization team to write this sort of script, but at that point it's not your average translation. And stuff like this gives us a bad name, especially in the age where people accept Google Translate as a valid option, while we humans slave away for virtually zero recognition :T
So spite the process as much as you want. It's valid. But don't think this is incompetence when it comes to translation. They were given the power to do more than just translate. This isn't your average thing translators do. To me? They're pseudo-authors, copy-pasting the most of the text via translation, and then filling in the gaps on their own and adjusting the text by themselves.