Quote Originally Posted by Kazhar View Post
Then for some reason, while they did all the groundwork to make Hydaelyn as despicable as she could, the story never frames her as such.
I agree with this much, and your final question. But it makes me go in the opposite direction to the "Venat should have been a villain" argument: rather, because everything surrounding it seems to be okay with her actions, it seems that the intention for the sake of the wider plot was to have her actions be acceptable – so how did they go so wrong in deciding what her actions were?

There was no need to make her consciously guilty of a deliberate sundering. It could have been an accident, an unintended consequence of some other action, or at very least a mistaken judgement by "Hydaelyn", an amalgamated primal will who is distinct from Venat as an individual.

They could have written that one scene to portray any number of scenarios, and the rest of the narrative really doesn't change around it, so I am more inclined to point to that scene and not everything else as the anomaly – especially when it doesn't add up with any of the information established in Shadowbringers about how the Sundering happened.

What happened in production? Was there a late rewrite? Did they somehow lose sight of everything they had already written in the rest of the story? It certainly feels like it.