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

[Lauront]

It may even be a case of grab whoever is still alive plus the two husbandos friendos - plus whatever Lahabrea's personal relation to Azem, he is described as highly competent and able to face off difficult situations calmly, so there's that.

Azem being responsible for the Unsundered would be real heavy tragedy. Although I'm not sure how Lahabrea would fit in there given that it doesn't reaaally seem like they would have gotten along (speaking of, I hope Pandaemonium ends up portraying him as socially awkward and a deadbeat father but still a good person nonetheless, with probably a damn good reason not to have gotten involved in events so far; personal theory is that the root cause of events involves Athena and something gone horribly wrong in some way), but his role as the expert on phantasmogeny would have come in handy regardless.

My problem about involving Azem is that I think the writers and devs probably don't want to touch Azem too much, or are being very careful with what they give us. Even though our character explicitly isn't Azem, we're still meant to identify ourselves as Azem somewhat, and people might be rather particular about their own character so the writers weighing in would feel "intrusive" so to speak.

Imagine how a certain puritanical Twitter crowd would react if they were told their character's Ancient self was personally responsible for Emet-Selch's continued existence. (Though I'm not sure how they cope with the canon of Azem being veryvery good friends with Emet in the first place. Probably by hardcore dissociating their character from Azem.)

True but with how they've separated say, Fandaniel from Amon, it's slightly peculiar. They keep belabouring the point that sundered have distinctive personas from their unsundered former counterparts. However, I do see your point here; the nuance would be lost on some that just because that Azem made a decision in a particular way, even with their soul having certain inherent tendencies, it does not imply they might not have decided differently for xyz reasons, and it'd be used to batter people over their head as to how their character now would act, and you'd get the "us" and the "we" nonsense which I already find tedious. Still, it's not going to go away even if unfortunate. Nonetheless, one could not blame Azem, just before the sundering, for trying to save their colleagues/friends, especially if as a result of staying neutral up to that point, the whole thing hit them out of the blue and they didn't realise just how desperate (to be polite) their mentor had become. Asking them to maintain neutrality in such a way surely isn't too much especially since SHB established some grounds for it.