On number 2 - I agree that it would feel a bit weird for us to come in and completely upend how society works in Alexandria, regardless of how justified we'd be in doing it. I'm very interested to see how they deal with all this in the patches, and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that they'll handle it well (for now at least!)

Personally, I can't see them bringing back the Endless, for a couple of reasons:
  • It would fly in the face of the themes of the final zone (about moving on and accepting loss).
  • I don't think the majority of the citizens of Alexandria even know the Endless existed - just that their memories go somewhere when a person dies. I can't see them clamouring to bring back a system they weren't really aware of in the first place.
It's the regulators that I'm more interested in seeing how they deal with - partly because they're a more integral/concious part of Alexandrian society, but also because I don't think what they do is really that objectionable? It's just how they do it.

Imagine if defibrillators in our world were powered by souls. Sure, we could take everyone's defibrillators away and let a load of people die as a result, but wouldn't it be better to just... find a different power source?

Doing some of the yellow quests in Solution Nine has me convinced this might be the direction they're going in the patch quests, as I feel like too much dialogue mentions the regulators for us to get rid of them completely (e.g. Towering Troubles has an NPC who's actively trying to get money to restock their souls, which would be a bit weird if that wasn't a thing you could do any more).

I can see us spending some time trying to figure out how to replace souls with 'souls', so that people can keep having their extra lives without messing with the natural order.

Or maybe I'm totally overthinking this, and we're just going to let them keep munching real souls. I feel like this game is usually better at tying off loose ends than that, though, so I'm staying optimistic that they'll find an interesting way to resolve it.

We'll see if the normal raids make any of this less/more plausible tomorrow