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

[Treesus]

If they hadn't tried to cram everything into one expansion so they could brush the whole story to the side, they could have built up Venat as a likeable character with some actual plot reasons as to why a Sundering was the only option.

But no, they didn't and the result was pure nonsense that didn't connect at all. The comic is nice, but the best thing SE could have done was not rushed the conclusion to a decade worth of story build up.

Agreed, but I also do feel like some of this was becoming...long winded? Im not saying rushing the ending was the right decision. But I also feel like there was plenty of fluff in past expansions that could have been easily cut for a more focused story around Venat and Zodiark, and the ancients on both sides, and why each side could be seen as both right and wrong. I still dont get the usefulness of the majority of stormblood outside giving us prettyboy Zenos. Had they cut out the majority of it and made shadowbringers take its place, and viseversa with EW and shadowbringers so they had more time to explore stuff between venat and the others, I feel like the ending would have felt alot better.

[Vyrerus]

Stormblood? What was its purpose other than Zenos?

Ok, so, some perspective for you. ARR wasn't expected to do well. It did, so HW was greenlighted, and they had to scramble it together. Lo and behold, they dropped another deadringer of a success, so BAM make another expansion please. So the writer's had to just crap out another story.

With that in mind, Stormblood is actually pretty dang good. It's probably the expansion that was least appreciated at the time(I am guilty of yammering to all of my friends that the game is on the downhill and it only gets worse from here).

To the point though, Stormblood's purpose is to bridge the story. They were still fleshing out exactly what they wanted to do with the Ascians, and that's why we got Zenos/Omega etc. Basically it was a filler arc. A truth that would be attributed to Shadowbringers, but it's actually not true about Shadowbringers (though obviously all periphery characters in SHB are filler cast, for the most part).

We get a more real confrontation with The Empire, as opposed to what'ssupposed to be the moral/spiritual/Emperor's Throne Room sequence with the Ascians. We also get lots of Outer Eorzea/Outside of Eorzea world building.

Stormblood had a decent MSQ followed by fantastic side and .1 to .55 content. Its purpose was to be as entertaining as possible while trying new things, since they figured it would be received poorly anyway. Beyond that, just to give us stuff to chew while they fleshed out the grand story they really wanted to tell.

That's how I see it, anyway.