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

[SeverianLyonesse]

See you all tomorrow, please prepare your Australia expansion concepts for then! Remember, you can't use any castles, knights, monarchies, gods, or churches. Good luck!

Prison expansion, lol.

Actually, in all honesty Australia could quite comfortably be a "frontier" expansion. Like a slightly more exotic version of the American West. Though imo it would just make sense to combine the two into the "New World", with maybe a sort of triangular spectrum of Austronesia, Latin America, and Anglo America filling out the continent. If the devs approached the New World with the same level of specificity that they did "Europe" and "Asia", we could feasibly have several expansions' worth of content on the other side of the world, cover the entire 10 year story arc even: Polynesia, Mesoamerica, the Andes and Amazon basin, the Caribbean, the American steppes, the Arctic, etc. etc.

I'd like something similar with Meracydia and Africa as well eventually (Egypt, Maghreb, Ethiopia, Swahili Coast, Madagascar, Yoruba/Akan regions, etc. etc.), but given how underrepresented that tends to be in American and Japanese media, I think it would take a lot more work and care to pull off. That said, given the depth of research FF puts into other regions, I think if done well this is the sort of media that could provide much needed exposure and education of African cultures and mythologies.