*Oh, Spoiler Warning in case it needed to be said
So I recently finished Yak T'el, and I disliked it enough that I'd rather write some literary critique than continue the MSQ. So, here we are. And, just to preface, these are just my opinions as a decent writer and someone who's played a lot of FFXIV. YMMV. Anyways, thus far I've found Dawntrail to be mostly enjoyable, though I think it's easily the weakest writing FFXIV has offered to date. The first 1/2 of the MSQ is a glorified sightseeing tour, the characters (both old and new) are rather flat, and then there's Wuk Lamat, who is just a mess.
She's not an unpleasant character per se, but she is flat as a pancake personality wise. She eats a lot, is rather klutzy, and likes 'peace'. She's basically a shoujo character (think Sailor Moon if you're not familiar with the term), and while that's not a problem in of itself, since Dawntrail (at least the first half of it) is the Wuk Lamat show, the rest of the story follows suit. She's the afternoon cartoon version of FFXIV's major themes, the 'friendship is MAGIC!' to FFXIV's usual "while it is true that man succumbs all too often to anger and avarice, he may yet overcome his baser instincts through the forming of bonds with others".
An easy comparison is Yak T'el's Mamool Ja part versus The Great Ship Vylbrand from post Shadowbringers. In latter, Merlwyb acknowledges Limsa's failures regarding the kobolds, frees one of their leaders from being tempered, and when quite rightly accused of betrayal offers her life up as penance if it would allow their peoples to move forward. Her failures, her responsibility. The result is the beginnings of potential peace, a complex resolution to a complex issue with hope for the future but nothing promised.
With the Mamool Ja, Wuk Lamat spends 20 minutes asking around, gets told the deepest secrets of the most extremely xenophobic remnants of a people who'd been breeding superwarriors at the expense of hundreds of children's lives, and then comes up with a solution in another 20 minutes. Never mind that a small population probably couldn't survive killing that many children over a sustained period of time, that a long suffering native people's problems could be solved in 20 minutes by the enlightened foreigners is borderline insulting. But from a writing perspective it's consistent with the rest of the story. Flat and rushed.
Apart from Kaona and Erenville (the former actually has some character development, and the other seems to have escaped the Wuk Lamat sphere of influence), the other side characters are similar impacted by the rushed and flattened writing. The ex-scions move from having meaningful character development and interactions on the side to being minor narrative devices.
1/2