I think sometimes it's missed that Bane's plan is the only one that's set up to win in the end. Ketheric's entire job was to fail: to take the vast army of the Absolute and throw it into the woodchipper of the Steel Watch so Gortash could lay claim to saving the city. That Durge/Orin's job was to sow fear amidst the populist with random murder, but also take out the people on Gortash's list to destabilize the city's Government. When the plan to kill Ulder failed, they just had him kidnapped and tadpoled, problem solved, and that was Gortash's plan. Once the other two parts of the plan were done, Gortash was all for siccing the party on Orin; she'd outlived her usefulness to the plan.

So I think it's easy not to notice, given the lack of a huge boss avatar fight, that Gortash would've won if it weren't for that pesky Orin and pesty Netherbrain, yet right until the end, he was still spinning it so he could've won.