Endwalker Story sucked and it's time to admit it

[Cleretic]

What did the cutscene at the end of Elpis show us? Venat doing a thing which might have been summoning Hydaelyn, or sundering the world. We will never know. However the cutscene is completely inconsistent with the story told thus far. Hydaelyn sundered Zodiark after a long battle.

That cutscene is not a literal depiction of events, and that fact is fairly clear once you step back and consider what you're actually looking at and realize that it can't be; neither Venat nor Emet would've walked past the violent monsters, we know that Hythlodaeus went in the first sacrifice and yet the crowd Venat opposes is bringing on the second, they don't really try to hide the fact that the entrance Venat uses to get to that crowd is a destroyed bridge, we know the Anamnesis meeting was after the second sacrifice, etc. So it's depicting a few different events in the following order:

1. Actual coming of End of Days with the beasties.
2. Hyth leaving to participate in the sacrifice.
3. Venat failing to convince the crowd not to do the second sacrifice. The blade lightshow is not literally the Sundering, but more reflective of Venat realizing that it's the only option available to her, and also being a fancy scene transition that suggests the Sundering.
(5.2 Anamnesis meeting goes here)
4. The super figurative march in the grey void that is both reflective of Venat's sacrifice and sadness at what she has subjected people to.

A lot of the things you say are 'contrived' are actually explained, but I get the feeling you don't really care about the explanation.

But... honestly, I think the big part where I disagree with you is that I actually don't think the Sundering is important for the story we're playing. It's a big establishing event to create the world, but that doesn't mean it needs to be fully elaborated on because the important thing is 'it happened and now we're here many years later'. It's kinda like the creation of the Triforce in Zelda: the situation in which they made it is nowhere near as important as just knowing that they did, and while you could certainly make a game about the creation of the Triforce (which... well, they did) that story is not essential to someone playing, say, Breath of the Wild.

If they wanted to make a game set in the Ancient world, they can go ahead and do that and it would be completely legitimate to expect much of the game to revolve around exactly the scenes you want to see (although I can't imagine the Sundering would be a great finale; maybe if you got Yoko Taro to pen it, he's good at making the weirdo endings satisfying). But that is not our story; our story is people twelve thousand years afterwards trying to stop the apocalypse, who took a brief sojourn back to try to find out if anyone knew anything helpful.

EDIT TO AN EDIT: There was a reply to a different post, but I realized it came off too mean, so I'm gonna hold my tongue on that.