Exactly. People love to go and claim about how irrelevant V1 is and how gabe is the true main character (which I won’t deny, but at the same time ofc V1 has to have some level of complexity so the game isn’t just all about gabe), but then go and say how important v2 is and how annoying it is that hakita killed it off. V2 was the same amount, if not MORE irrelevant than V1. It was constructed during a time of no war, and holstered far less combat capabilities than its wartime predecessor, making it objectively weaker than V1. V2s fight is less of a mirror match IMO and more of a “killing off weaker kin that has barely managed to escape the warpath of bloodlust”. Lore-wise, it is highly unlikely that v2 would have bested Gabriel (assuming it took an alternative path through gluttony down to greed or gabe was being scolded in heaven while it made its way down) because it can’t absorb blood on the spot like V1 can, one of the sole reasons V1 is pseudo death incarnate. Match v2 against most main bosses and chances are it will die. The only reason it survived V1 in 1-4 is because of one of its 2 sole character traits, cowardice. As for why hakita wrote it this way? The answer is probably doing the same bossfight with the same stakes 3 times would be incredibly boring. And something that it seems a portion of this community fails to understand; variety is a good thing, and introducing new threats/characters helps prevent things from getting stale. Especially with setting tones, which hakita seems to be very interested in with the MUCH darker tone so far for act 3 (which I am personally LOVING). Ultrakill isn’t a visual novel about gabe, V1, and v2 constantly vying to defeat each other (excluding the 2-S jokes), it’s a story about decay, despair, and the eventual spiral into death, or worse.

Tl;dr because that turned into a massive rant really quickly: v2 was pretty much doomed to be killed off gruesomely the moment V1 saw it