Quote Originally Posted by Lunaxia View Post
As for Emet-Selch, I think what pissed him off regarding the sundered isn't their inability to reach technological milestones (especially since as you say, such progress was frequently trashed by their side anyway) but the way they allow their base instincts of greed, selfishness, malice, and violence to dictate their actions and create widespread destruction and tragedy. It's basically anathema to what the Ancients believed in and how they operated, so his disdain isn't really surprising.
First of all: Again, their fault. Like, if that were truly his point, he's weakened it by intrusion. Real 'stop hitting yourself' energy there.

Second of all: Our trips into Elpis and (especially) Pandaemonium have shown that Ancients can absolutely be greedy, selfish, malicious and violent, and in fact, I would argue that every single Ascian we've met was all four of those. You could argue perhaps that Amaurot was better set up to counteract those, but I would argue otherwise and point to Pandaemonium; they were pretty ripe for a bad actor to do some real damage.

Honestly, with this point I've never seen anything resembling evidence that Ancients were actually smarter than sundered people (and the writers can write 'smarter species than humans' fairly convincingly; the dragons, the Omicron and the Ea come to mind, although they had their own problems), but I have seen ample evidence that Emet would lie to both us and ourselves to make the Ancients look better and like more of a tragic loss, and us as worse.