Ah yes, the tiny circle of people who also found Hythlodeaus a manufactured bland pretty boy friend and thus was repelled by him. That it’s more acceptable and wide-spread to admit bouncing off of how strongly the game pushes you onto Haurchefant and the Scions when Hythlodeaus is a shallower rushed version.

Back to the original topic, I thought it was painfully obvious that the escape plan was a backup plan and was created not really for itself but to give the necessary psychological need of a ‘backup option’ as to keep people from despair. An arduous task with the option to quit it makes it easier to stick with it and pour your best effort rather than having no choice but to do it. That any plan is better than floundering around with nothing and as long as people had the illusion of the safety net they could focus on creating and carrying out a real plan that would address the problem instead of papering it over and pretending it doesn’t exist (the end goal of the Zodiark plan). Kicking the can down the road isn’t a viable solution, which was the real narrative danger of if the story went with the Moon Escape Plan - then the SF story trope would be the survivors landing on the new planet and rebuilding and having convinced themselves that Meteion’s Song wouldn’t find them, they would forget the reason that they fled and just focus on building their new planet.