Was anyone disappointed/underwhelmed with Shadowbringers, but LOVED Endwalker?

[Cleretic]

I really liked Endwalker because of its existentialist themes. It's not perfect - it's got pacing issues, some things come a little out of left field - but I feel it was much more thought provoking and philosophically complex than Shadowbringers. If you enjoy that kind of thing and don't go in expecting it to be Shadowbringers 2: Electric Boogaloo you'll probably enjoy it; it's a tough sell otherwise, especially if you liked the Ancients and dislike the somewhat trite answer it offers for the big question.

Yeah, I think the most important compliment I can give to Endwalker is that it's really trying some stuff. It's not just the most ambitious in terms of scale, it's also the most ambitious in terms of concepts it's playing with and questions it's asking. Debatably too much so, it's a little overstuffed and can't give everything the spotlight it deserves, but it's not for lack of effort or ideas, and I think your interest in Endwalker as a story is reliant on how willing you are to meet it in that headspace. The moment you're rejecting something out of turn (not 'considering everything and personally coming to a different conclsion', I mean outright rejection of the premise), you're gone and it's highly unlikely you're coming back.

All of that's about the Endwalker MSQ, though, Endwalker's side content is running on entirely different appeal, and that appeal is mostly 'hey you really like the Ancients, right!?'

[Cilia]

All of that's about the Endwalker MSQ, though, Endwalker's side content is running on entirely different appeal, and that appeal is mostly 'hey you really like the Ancients, right!?'

Spoiler Boxing for OP's sake.

Pandaemonium definitely runs on Ancient appeal. 100%, "Oh hey you met Amaurot-era Emet-Selch and Venat and even Hythlodaeus! Wanna meet Amaurot-era Lahabrea and Elidibus?!"
(It's not bad, and having Athena be a legitimately contemptible villain just serves to illustrate that however rosy the image Emet-Selch tries to sell of Amaurot is it was not perfect, and one person going off the rails was infinitely more dangerous.)

Myths of the Realm actually gave concrete answers for lingering plot elements from way back in the day - the Twelve and their iconography have been part of the game's lore since Legacy. Expounding on that was only natural, and the fact it ties into Endwalker's themes of moving on from the legacy of the Ancients (by taking Nietzsche's "God is dead and we have killed Him" to an almost literal extreme) and finding our own path forward leaves me not at all irritated or annoyed with it.

Then the interim MSQ and Dawntrail had us continue to deal with the Ascians' screw-up(s) and tacked on a Pandaemonium wrap-up quest with Wind-up Themis in 7.1. Meanwhile I'm still waiting for my Zenos minion...

[Brightamethyst]

Yeah, I think the most important compliment I can give to Endwalker is that it's really trying some stuff. It's not just the most ambitious in terms of scale, it's also the most ambitious in terms of concepts it's playing with and questions it's asking.

The problem is, ambition only counts if you can pull it off, and not everyone thought SE stuck the landing here.

You can only judge things for what they are. You don't get bonus points for what could have been. It's clear that the writers had more ideas than they were able to juggle cleanly, and some balls were inevitably dropped (though which ones those are will vary depending on who you ask.)

[Cleretic]

You can only judge things for what they are. You don't get bonus points for what could have been.

No, you can't. I'm very happy to give points for effort when talking about a story, because I think there's value in a good idea even if it doesn't stick the landing. You may think otherwise, but I'm not you.

The way to lose me with a good idea is to actively squander or sabotage it, to either completely ignore or actively make decisions to work against that idea rather than just whiffing on execution, and Endwalker actually mostly doesn't do that, although there's one very clear example to me. Keeping within Endwalker, and spoiler-tagging again for the OP's sake:

I think one of the only things that Endwalker actively squanders is the escaped slaves in Garlemald. Garlemald's a great example, honestly, because a lot of the ideas there are exactly where I go 'points for effort'; the stuff with the girls who ran away from us, Quintus still holding onto his bitter grudges even now, the stuff with the radios, basically everything surrounding In from the Cold and the Anima reveal, even their patch content stuff and the Nerva storyline in the role quest finale... a lot of it's not perfect, mostly because it doesn't have the space to really do its best work, but they get their points across well enough for me to give them a thumbs-up. That's alongside the stuff they actually did nail because it was stuff that excelled in being smaller and low-key, like Jullus' stuff and Quintus' death scene.

But the escaped slaves they just do absolutely nothing to explore, to the point of them being pretty chummy over the patches despite us mostly working with... y'know, the people that enslaved them. Everything else Garlemald as a zone does states itself strongly enough, and executes well enough, that I can see what they want to do and am happy to take the ball and run with it; with the slaves their unwillingness to actually play with them actually ruins whatever they could have done with them.

EDIT: There are some places where I won't give those points for effort, but it's mostly on actual gameplay and spectacle fronts; if you're doing a thing that requires a certain level of visceral bigness or difficulty, you can't get away with just reaching 'I see what you were going for'. The Endwalker alliance raids are a good example of that: I can't give a thumbs up to those raids, because those fights needed to be big, threatening and imposing to really sell those bosses, and they really aren't; the storyline as a whole struggles to work, because those bosses aren't impressive enough for what they're supposed to be.