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

[CrownySuccubus]

Sure, it could've been an effort to paint the ancients as morally grey. But from my perspective, I thought that the game director's intention was to really drive home the point that Elpis and its occupants are scientists that experiment with living organisms, and not necessarily to portray the entire ancients civilization as morally grey.

There's no "could have" here. We are flat out told several times that the society of the Ancients was not the paradise they thought it was. Hermes has an existential breakdown wondering why he's the only one who sees the flaws while he demonstrably shows that his comrades are way too quick to give up on living beings. We're treated to a major cutscene when Venat tries to convince her fellow Ancients that they can't ignore suffering, only for them to disregard her, and force her to sunder the world so that mankind can know suffering and overcome it.

And, as I mentioned, we have the devs outright telling us that one of the doomed planets we saw was exactly where the Ancients were heading if they ever achieved the "perfection" they craved.

If you see all this and think "well, I don't see how they were intentionally painting them as morally-grey", then I don't know what to tell you.

It's probably not elaborate for you, but for the writing team that worked on EW? Yeah, it just might be.

This is high-school-book-report levels of theming. It's not elaborate. Hell, the one guy who wrote Attack on Titan created an entire narrative expressing themes of defeat, isolation and kyriarchy. Endwalker was written by a team of writers, who had two full versions and four expansions to draw material from, not to mention other games in a billion-dollar franchise.

It's not that elaborate.