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

[CrownySuccubus]

2) The conflict between the presentation of Hermes (villain) and Venat (heroine) despite not only their motives (dissatisfaction with Ancient society) and results (end of Ancient civilization) being similar. Why is one bad and one good? Yoshi-P even compares Venat to the Ascians and, again, I'm left wondering why she's not also bad when she's guilty for as much and more while having less sympathetic intent.

That's just it -- according to the writers themselves, they didn't intend EITHER of them to be considered "bad". They use terms like "mistake" and "important first step" to describe Hermes' actions. To the writers, the Ancients are not a group of people unfairly and unjustly murdered, they're a group of wannabe gods that thought themselves above suffering and death before being ready for it.

As I've mentioned, there's a sort of "human worship" that the story fully buys into, whereas the present day humankind (that is, all intelligent species) are inherently better or more worthy than other forms of life. Avoiding that was why I was hoping that END didn't devolve into "punch God with the power of friendship" that most other JRPGS do, but it arguably did something just as bad with "Something else already punched our strawman for God, so now punch THAT instead with the power of friendship".

the comments on Venat's entry in the JP character poll

I missed this. When/where did this happen?

My initial understanding was likewise that the goal was to MINIMIZE casualties, particularly to tempered Garleans that were otherwise civilians. And I was totally okay with that. But then we got the scene where Estinien drops some Garlean grunt and Y'Shtola chides him for even INJURING the guy because the two teenagers have said we aren't supposed to kill ANYONE. And then throughout the gameplay in that segment everyone I crack over the skull with my big ole honking axe just falls down with a boo-boo.

Instead of writing anything remotely intelligent for how our characters smartly minimized casualties, they just had The Plot Itself declare that NO ONE DIED LOL. It could be said that I'm being very uncharitable in interpreting what's being shown in that Y'Shtola and Estinien clip, and that despite it suggesting the opposite, the understanding among the characters and in the plot is that there were casualties, and we simply tried to keep them to a bare minimum. But there is still no excuse for no one bringing up the Conquerer's Chain. That is a mistake literally none of these characters could conceivably make.

Eh. I can see the problem, sure. But I guess it didn't bother me any more than the 10,000 other missions we do where our mission is to spar with or weaken some type of target without killing them. If I can shoot somebody with a steampunk shotgun at short range and have them just down on their knees and panting in the next cutscene, I've already checked out of expecting realistic wounds regardless of the level of violence.