What lore do you ignore?

[Cleretic]

I ignore the whole "going back in time" part of EW. We have Azem's crystal. Our crystal. I don't think its that hard for Elpis to just be our memories of having gone there as Azem instead of time travel BS.

That's not what Azem's crystal does. It is explicitly mentioned that it does not have any actual memories of Azem, only that one spell. It doesn't function like the others, because it wasn't designed in the same way or in the same batch. Emet made it as essentially a memento for himself in secret, rather than a tool for ascending an Azem.

I'm not gonna say you can't have reasons to reject the Elpis bit for other reasons (I have my own complaints about it), but no, we literally didn't have a means to do it ourselves. I was going to say that we theoretically could've used the crystal to summon up an apparition of someone who was there, like how Emet got dragged in for the Seat of Sacrifice, but... no, that wouldn't work either, because we didn't know who was actually there until going.

EDIT: Unless you're also choosing to ignore the fact the Azem crystal doesn't do that, which... I guess I can't stop you doing?