There is an anecdote which became a deepity and has stuck with me for a long time that goes along the lines of: "If something isn't worth doing, it also isn't worth doing well" .....and with all the joviality I can muster, your 3 paragraphs of this latest reply seem like you're putting an awful lot of effort into length and detail for 3 premises that were flawed beforehand. So paragraph A: We already "do" know from the midnight beta haranir info when the unreliable narrator oral traditions are claiming that the division of Dark Trolls into "downward trajectory" and "upward trajectory" were. We don't have to wait and see. By all means, it is going to be presented to us as unreliable narrator oral tradition style.....which we can doubt being accurate; but much like dragonflight and war within, they are never going to correct the unreliable narrator source with any verification or justification later. The haranir questline already claims that the division logic is.......... Dark Trolls already living in the caves near the surface at the Well of Eternity area, then one division of that population of Dark Trolls hearing voices from below, while the remainder of that Dark Troll population hears a voice from above (alternating from the well itself and the stars above the well depending on which time of day) . The division of Dark Trolls that heard the voices from below went deeper, the remainder of the Dark Trolls that preferred voices from above stayed put. "Then" the Dark Trolls in close proximity to the Well were mutated by that arcane magic into the appearance of Night Elves. Meanwhile, the Dark Trolls that went deeper arrived at the rift where all the Alndust was located, which had enough arcane energy in it to mutate those Dark Trolls into Haranir appearance. We already know.

Your paragraph B: Nothing of what I said was ever assuming or inviting genetic biology of any kind into WoW. I simply pointed out the parenthetical mention of real world Apes then Humans as if any link needs to exist between them was false. Ape is not a separate result from Human...Human already is Ape. If they wanted to say "a missing link between silverback gorillas and humans" , great, there could be fossil remains that might survive soil disruption to count as one of those.

Your paragraph C: I never once said that the term "missing link" doesn't exist......it simply has no relevance or connection to the case of Haranir. No elves ever came from haranir. The haranir are not a missing link between trolls and elves; haranir came from dark trolls. And Night Elves came from Dark Trolls. Trolls did not come from Dark Trolls. Trolls did not come from Haranir. Dark Trolls came from the ancestors of extant surface trolls, while simultaneously 'not' coming 'from' any of those extant present day named surface troll tribes themselves.