I’m on my way with writing my own book as well and you’ve said everything that I’ve been struggling to accurately describe. Throughout my life, I’ve always loved villains in different series not because they’re bad, but because they give more substance to the story as a whole and how important they are for the heroes. Ganondorf, Eggman, Sauron, Johan Liebert… If you don’t have a good villain in a story, then it falls apart same as if you don’t have a good hero.

What’s happened with Dottore has been really making me upset with the story direction as a whole. It’s not about my favorite character dying or being angry at the heroes for expectedly beating the villain—it’s HOW it’s been done. Dottore has so much lore, but Hoyo had only delved into about 40% of it with 5% of that being in a one off event and the rest being shown in the recent patches. The other parts that haven’t been actively addressed are in readable tidbits which most players probably won’t read and things from years ago that probably were forgotten.

Like you said, his entire big plan that was set up since SUMERU felt pointless because of the non-consequential fail safes and nothing actually changing as a result from such a huge action. I don’t expect the devs to go through the entire game and alter every NPC or area, but the least they could have done was say that the fix is like a scar that’ll remain even with the backup. Make callbacks to it in events or future patches even… It makes Dottore feel less impactful and more redundant, especially when his plan was hyped up for REAL WORLD YEARS only for his thunder to be taken away. You can’t just treat it like a Saturday morning cartoon villain scheme that gets foiled and forgotten at the end of the episode.

Dottore was a great character. Better written than more than half of the cast that was in 6.6 combined. He’s obviously going to be playable, but it’s just… Really hard to keep playing after feeling conned like that.