Quote Originally Posted by dies_irae View Post
My theory is that they rushed to end the current arc to free up all the talents that made FF14 great. Either because they themselves wanted to move on from FF14 (YoshiP, Koji, Ishikawa, ...) ,the company decided to move them to other projects, or they wanted to leave because they did not want to deal with outside influence (consulting companies) interfering with their work.
So they "solved" every mystery/threat that was left in this arc:
-Garmelmald killed off screen
-Omicron threat killed off screen
- Hydaelyn and Zodiark
- Zenos
- Ascians
- What happened to the dragon star
- the twelve just being ancients that we help committing suicide ... (i really hated that story)

At first i thought they did that because they had this great new arc ready to go but after playing DT it is obvious that they have nothing.
Yoshida admitted they initially planned Endwalker to be two parts in one of the LLs. Ishikawa decided it would be better to condense the story into one as she didn't think there would be enough material. That was also a concern of Yoshida's, alongside whether people would like a potential cliffhanger that wouldn't really have a full resolution until two years later.

So assuming all that to be correct, they absolutely rushed to the conclusion. It hurt Endwalker in my opinion but also left them with next to nothing for Dawntrail. My own theory is they were wholly unprepared for a brand new story and vastly underestimated the position it put them in. Hence why Dawntrail feels like a big filler arc because, well, I suspect that's exactly what it will become. An expansion made to buy them another two years.