Raiding in The Arcadion: Our Heroic Hypocrisy

[Voidmage]

There is no hypocrisy.

We don't eat souls to enhance ourselfes in battle. We fight with what we have only summoning allies.
The souls in the tournament are set free after we win. If anything we do them a favour.

We didn't use Ardbert to fix our disintegrating soul. He voluntary rejoined with us to enhance our aether capabilities to safe his own world, find an end to his journey and defeat one of his own enemies.
The use of the soul is also different.
Ardbert was rejoined with us. His souls didn't just juice up our soul battery like the Alexandrians it actually made our soul denser. Is it a good thing? No and it is never portrait as that. We remember Ardbert and his sacrifice and if we knew them we would do the same for the other rejoined souls.
The technology stuff is "eating a soul". Breaking down it's aether and preventing a joining into the lifestream for that soul.

It's true that we live with denser souls then the rest but that's not our fault. The Ascians forced that on the people of the source.
I'm pretty sure we wouldn't go around and snack on our shard counterparts just because.

Now my memory of the relics is pretty old right now and I don't remember every step.

The ARR weapon is strenghtened from aetheric energies and so it attuned with our soul (Nexus I think it was). It just uses ambivalent aether after the death of creatures (you know that poof the enemies make? That's aether being released, the body if you want.) and it's memory aether (in some steps).
The soul is different from that.
The soul is a separate form made of memories and the actual true soul.
I don't have the steps of the relics in my head but if I remember correctly we also kill robots in the books.
If you find the word soul in them I would asume that either refers to the memory or is old information. Note that they only introduced the true nature of souls in EW.

The HW weapon is more akin to summoning carbuncle. You use different stuff and ambivalent aether to give it a form.
Most of the time we rebuild the weapon because it can't house the huge aether amounts.
In the end we create a new soul out of all that aether just like what happens in the aetherial sea.

SB:
We learn that memories and souls are a different thing in EW.
The memory would just be flushed away in the aetherial sea anyway and these are monsters.

Bozja is the same.

We don't trap actual souls, only aether.
A soul is made out of aether but not all aether is a soul.
It is a really protected and it seems dense ball that is hard to break down.
There is a reason white Auracite was such a huge deal (Ascians, the traveling from the first). It's because a soul is incredibly hard to contain and even harder to break down.
Elidibus was absorbed by the crystal tower and even then he was able to go to the aetherial sea and be reborn.
Y'sthola was in the lifestream without a guiding beacon twice and is still alive.
Even in the aetherial sea it takes a long time to break down souls and memories (Papalymo and co) and then there is the whole thing of people with the echo not being broken down at all but just reborn without memory.

Did I miss something?
That's just from the top of my head. For more details I would have to look into cutscenes and the ingame lore and it is quite late here.
Maybe tomorrow evening or something.


Edit:
Please don't see this as a big contra point or as ripping your post apart.
It's a good topic to talk about.

Edit 2:
I can't cross out that there are contradictions in the game right now tbh.
We are supposed to see the separation of soul and memory in Solution 9 as something groundbreaking but you imply correct that we actually used memories for relics and also saw voidsent being affected by the memory of their victims".
We also learned that when voidsent die they release the aether and are at risk to fall prey to their former victims. Yet Solution 9 implies that the soul is used up in that whole process.
Someone please correct me if I understood something wrong here.