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

[Lauront]

My personal feeling is that because I do believe/hope that it was basically unintentional, now that it's been pointed out and come to their attention, that I can get past it and basically forgive it if it is addressed in some way. Please, please do not double down on "Venat absolute good, those Ancients sadly just had to die," FFXIV team. I've loved your game for almost ten years, want to keep loving it, and I really wish I wasn't here, cringeposting all my dignity away. Woe.

^This. I'm on the fence about the game and willing to give it a chance, particularly now that they've had time to digest how the story was received vs what they intended, but if they do end up just doubling down on such themes, I think I'll take my leave.

I mean, yeah, that's exactly why they failed. In making us sympathize with the Ascians over Shadowbringers they made Zodiark into a Not Actually Evil god, thus writing themselves into a hole that made it hard to justify why what Venat did was good. When they made Zodiark neutral at worst, the introduction of "oh the world was gonna die anyway" didn't really stick. Instead of accepting that Hydaelyn is now a morally gray figure at best (allowing us to defeat an intergalactic world-ender, at the price of ending a civilization) they tried and failed to retcon that back to Hydey good Zodey bad world gonna die (I feel like YoshiP was partly responsible for this) and it fell apart. This is intent vs result, my point.

And most of us here would agree with that.