Honestly I'm still baffled as to why people treat the Ancient world as "peaceful town that hides sinister things/death cult/etc" horror movie trope, or that Pandaemonium and Elpis are a "gotcha!" against the Ancients. Sure they look like humans, but their biology and culture are very different they might as well considered as aliens. So why are we using our moral standard to judge them? What's normal to us may not normal for them, and vice versa. Saying that they're "scary" and "wrong".... no offense but I can't help but to see it as an intolerant act.
(also, even using our moral standard, what the Ancients did are far, far better than what humans did. Go ask the kidnapped women in sastasha which world is worse)
You know, I don't remember people condemning all those au ra tribes on Steppe, even though they have customs and cultures that's borderline criminal from our perspective. It's interesting that a lot of people doesn't extend the same understanding and tolerance to the Ancients. Why is that I wonder? Is it because the narrative tried to sell the Ancients way of living as a bad thing? Or was it born from jealousy of seeing how much better the Ancients world is compared to the sundered (and real life)?
After having the short story quoted here, I don't get why you fail to understand that the Ironworks didn't gamble anything for their future. They didn't wake up G'raha and invent time travel to save their present and future, they did it so to create an alternate reality where the 8th calamity is prevented even though it may result in them being erased. The moment Cid and others decided on this plan, we could argue that they have given up on their timeline. With how advance Omega and Allag technologies were, I doubt they couldn't build their own labyrinthos if they wanted to. Yet they focused (and imo, wasted) their resources on the time travel plan.
And funny enough, the game presents this as a selfless heroic thing. Never did once it give us the chance to doubt or disagree with it.
Just in case it's lost on you, we've been talking about time travel in Pandaemonium, not in Elpis (6.0). And as you might notice, Pandaemonium happens after we save the universe by beating meteion.