3) Corporate Meddling aka people who have no business dictating the writing and story direction nevertheless getting their grubby little hands all over the artwork. Someone with more power than sense comes along and says "We really want to push Wuk Lamat for this expansion, she needs to be center stage at all times!" (insert Simpsons Poochie reference). Or someone took a look at the script and said, "Well it's okay I guess, but everyone loved that big reveal of Amaurot in Shadowbringers, right? Can you make something like that again? Everyone will love that!" And now a writer has to come back and tell the team, "X-san said we need to make Living Memory more like Amaurot but with Final Fantasy XI." In some places of the story, (rubber bullets cough cough), it feels like someone or some group came in and demanded constant rewrites to include more X, less Y. Some amount of feedback and rewriting is normal and good, but only if it's coming from a person who understands how good writing and storytelling work, a thing corporate types are notoriously terrible at. This is kind of approaching problem 1 from the opposite angle and giving the writers the benefit of the doubt while blaming some part of management that was trying to micromanage everything. Perhaps the reason the writing gets so messy and everywhere is because they were having to rewrite things constantly as they went because more "requests" from higher-ups were brought to the table in a way that just didn't happen during the writing of previous expansions. I know it's been floated in other threads that what we were shown in early Dawntrail and what we actually got seem very different, like the story was being written and rewritten up to the last second. That could also explain some of clunky voice acting, as they didn't give the VAs time for several takes due to running behind schedule with the script.