10th Anniversary Amano key art [6.5+ Spoilers?]

[Absimiliard]

Yeah, the Lufaine were retconned into being a big thing in Angry Jack's Rage-A-Thon Ft. Frank Sinatra, they were literally nothing of note before then. Cid of the Lufaine was in Dissidia as a wink-nudge reference to FFI (specifically the remakes of FFI, the original version didn't mention Cid at all), not as a hint to some greater alien society responsible for everything bad in the series.

I believe you are understating Cid's importance in Dissidia here. Whatever their reason for putting him there, he was quite pivotal to the plot. They also used it as an opportunity to expand on his and his people's backgrounds, although we can't say for certain the additions made there reflect things as they are/were in the original FF1 setting. Different worlds and all that. Even were those additions intended to be present in FF1 as well, it wouldn't have any bearing on the rest of the series.

As to the subject of retcons; Stranger of Paradise and Dissidia are both explicitly stated to occupy their own alternate realities, so neither actually have bearing on one another or on FF1. Both games indisputably took things from FF1 (far more so in the case of Stranger of Paradise, it being a reimagining and all), but that is where the connection ends. Even the arrival of characters clearly shown to hail from Dissidia in Stranger of Paradise turn out to be from an alternate version of that reality, and so they remain distinct even as verifiably Dissidian characters. Almost every Final Fantasy is wholly unrelated to the others despite how frequently we see shared characters, so it should come as no surprise those games are not exceptions.

As I mentioned in a prior post, there are a few exceptions: Greg is normally the same character each time he appears, and Omega and Shinryu are some of the time. On a tangentially related note, I'm pretty glad they didn't use the Omega and Shinryu for FFXIV. Doing so would've necessitated bringing them down to something more manageable, and that's kinda... nah.

Anywho, in the interest of not further derailing the thread:

What are the odds the woman in gold could be a visual representation of Etheirys itself? We know the planet has its own will distinct from Zodiark and Venat, both of whom were in many ways what one might call usurpers. With Zodiark destroyed and Venat deader than dead, mayhaps the world's own will finally gets an artistic representation?