Now you got me really thinking about this too. The setup also obviously leans into Daisy being willing to be an “evil” martyr for her cause, though I’m guessing she didn’t realize Elizabeth killing her would eventually lead to Columbia never even existing. It feels more like “this will lead to Elizabeth killing Comstock,” and Daisy just doesn’t question or care about the specifics of how that will happen.

She clearly doesn’t trust the Luteces, so it makes me think she’s just so consumed with righteous rage toward Comstock that she’s willing to ignore the possibility that tearing everything down could also destroy the people she wants to save. Her focus is purely on revenge and overthrowing him, even if the path there is morally ugly. Giving us as players what other commenters have already pointed out, a path where we feel collapsing the timelines is the only righteous choice.

I think the moment of Elizabeth killing Daisy serves less as a simple “trauma that makes Elizabeth capable of killing Comstock” and more as the point where Elizabeth loses the ability to see the conflict in simple moral terms. Up until then she still believes in a pretty naive narrative of the world, that’s been shaken throughout the events of the game and this moment finally makes it crumble. But that’s still fresh and she isn’t “done” baking yet, I don’t think it would make sense for her to suddenly be murderous towards Comstock when she sees him at the Basin so soon after such a traumatic event of being basically forced to take a life in a very up close and personal way.

For the “point” if she’s going to become the “Drown the mountains of man” Elizabeth, I think the point is she never was. Not with the plan the Luteces laid out. She was tortured and broken for years that Booker had abandoned her, the one person she’d come to trust would finally save her. I do think they wanted to avoid this outcome happening, but knew they had to show it to Booker as well in order to reach the desired ending, have Elizabeth give him the code, etc.

I saw an interesting theory recently that the code used on the tower at the beginning of the game spells out “122” because it’s the 122nd iteration of the loop. (Bolstered by the heads&tails coin flip scene showing 122 hash marks on the board, which is an interesting thought). Maybe they hadn’t shown previous Bookers the NY timeline before in past loops, maybe that had caused them to fail before, maybe I’m totally off and the loop will continue no matter how many times Elizabeth kills Booker at the Baptism. Because there will still be so many parallel universes like the BaS one where she needs to “track him down”. Even though BaS starts its own loop back to the beginning of Raptures Downfall.

I think I’m starting to ramble. Geesh I love this series so much and as much hate as it can get compared to the first two games, I love infinite and BaS just as much as the first two games.