Looking at the recent treatment of Venat, I came to the conclusion that the writing team just can't pull off a main female character. They all get beautiful character models, lovely costumes and that's it.
When it comes to female side characters, we get less beauty but far more personality and more interesting people (Moenbryda, Fordola etc).

With major female characters the writers seem to make the same mistake over and over, they tell us how wonderful these women are but they don't bother to show it in the game.
Apparently, the Scions really needed Minfillia, no evidence in-game for this whatsoever. She is just an annoying damsel in distress we have to keep saving because.... reasons.
Similarly, M'naago tells us what a great leader Lyse is going to be, yet there is no evidence of her budding leadership prior to Stormblood and the main reason for having her lead the resistance is her dad was important.

The whole 'Yda was really Lyse' thing seemed totally pointless to me. I never knew Lyse and didn't care about her and all, but the deception did affect how I felt about her. All the other scions were apparently in on the whole deception, but they didn't bother to tell the WoL, that rankled, and it did make me wonder about Lyse's mental state. What it didn't do was make me feel she'd make a great leader in a crisis or want to have half the expansion revolving around her.