What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Kozh]

You’re stretching believability for the sake of your own headcanon.

Rich coming from you, miss "the Ancients has reached their perfection and are stagnating".

Prove either

Is this really the hill you wanted to die on? Or do you perhaps have amnesia and forget everything about the previous boss? Hydaelyn straight up had to shield us from Ultima magic. To kill lahabrea we need the dragon eye. Emet was defeated by the help of blessing of light (and a continent worth of light aether that we manage to contain because we have blessing of light). In elidibus fight we only survived because of the Azem crystal MADE by Emet, and he also directly save us from the rift. Heck, all this time we're being empowered by Blessing of Light and the Echo (which is a remnant of the Ancient power).

Just throw Hermes in Pandaemonium, which is on fire atm, that’ll be great. Surely no problem will emerge when he’s needed to summon Zodiark.

Except his real contribution is figuring where the final days will hit first, not about Zodiark. They could have substitute him with anyone else if they have the knowledge of meteion beforehand.

Judging by your previous posts, I think you're under the assumption that the Ancients are: 1) playing gods, 2) kill predatory creatures. Which is just plain wrong. For first point, even the short story clearly said "when men and gods are the same" regarding the Ancient. Ethyris was untamed wilderness, and they are responsible for managing it and creating ecosystem. They do set their own standard because no one else is going to.

This leads to second point. If you pay attention, the creatures in elpis only looks pacified because they're on testing phase. And even then, please don't ignore the fact that they were given the abilities to attack or protect themselves. They don't "only make peaceful creatures". The wolf thingy is a special case because they're so aggressive and rabid. If you're a scientist tasked to create an artificial ecosystem, would you release a creature that would wreak havoc and potentially erase several other species just because you feel bad for them? That would be irresponsible.

Speaking of "betterment of the star", from what I read on the memo scattered across Ktisis, it feels more that rather than ra-la type of perfection, the Ancients betterment are more about how to maintain the ecosystem in general. Considering that they still allow natural events to happen (i.e letting volcano erupt).