Hum, so, to address that, since I was mentioned...
In past editions, elementals didn't really have a well-defined place. Demons were more interesting as summoned tools, and had clearer design precepts which meant they received a disproportionate amount of homebrew - as a minion spell compared to Demon of the First Circle, Summon Elemental leaned entirely on the fact that hey hey hey maybe you can summon the Kukla lol. Ghosts weren't great, but they were still more interesting as reflections of humanity and a parallel civilization (in the Underworld). Even things like youkai and oni mainly had their concept-space janked by Raksha. Gods filled most of the other narrative slots for spirits, and to make matters worse their Terrestrial/Celestial split managed to be more interesting than the God/Elemental split. Elementals were effectively "spirits you can mostly summon that basically act like gods I guess". This was true even in-universe, where they aped the Bureaucracy of Gods without anyone - even the writers - really seeming to know or care why.
If anyone can tell me off the top of their head whether the Dogs Of Broken Earth were elementals or terrestrial gods, will call them a liar who had the relevant pdf open on their computer.
Even their history was garbled and unintuitive - there had been five Great Elementals, who weren't related to the five other giant elemental spirits, who'd been murdered by the Primordials. Their fragments turned into Elementals, who had nothing to do with any of the other Elemental-type characters, but gradually transformed into Elemental Dragons - who, again, had nothing to do with the, uh, Elemental Dragons. Then they bummed around and acted like sort of gods, but not really.
So Elementals were one of the things that definitely needed a change in 3e, even if they were less visible in their awfulness than some others.
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My take on their new direction was initially inspired by Autochthonian Elementals, which have a more distinct role within their own setting, but quickly became its own thing more aimed at the
Firebird sequence in Fantasia, with a touch of Pokemon, Princess Mononoke, and Reus. The idea, essentially, was that Elementals have always existed, as natural instruments of Creation's elemental homeostasis.
They're the immune system of the dragonlines, spawning en-masse in the wake of major elemental shifts, or in lighter numbers with the turning of the seasons. Most elementals just dissolve when they're done, and those that stick around are basically animals. Of those, the majority end up as the guard dogs or pets of a Terrestrial God with a somewhat-related purview (illegal, of course, but overlooked). They're spiritual "wildlife", essentially, with little numinous power, rooted in the material - of the few that stick around, only a
very few become enlightened enough to be genuinely intelligent.
Though those that
do have a tendency to start gathering their less sapient fellows around them into gangs (or "Elemental Courts", if they've got pretensions) in places at the edge of divine attention, and start reshaping their local surroundings into its "natural" state, as they see it - i.e. lots of their element. These elementals can get to wield intimidating levels of power, especially since they tend to be overlooked by gods as mere beasts or "lesser" spirits - up until it becomes clear that they can hold their own, at least, at which point the talk of "our Elemental cousins" starts coming out.
This is the sort of thing that Sidereals tend to split their time between a) dealing with, because it fucks up their plans for the local area or gets them favours from local gods and b) quietly encouraging or ignoring, because it creates bulwarks against the Wyld, occupies uppity gods, gives them an avenue of spiritual influence in Creation which has no official path of remonstration against their meddling, and it's not actually their job to deal with it anyway. Legally speaking, elementals don't exist - they show up, balance the seasons, and vanish. That's the official line.
There are a
very very few elementals who become strong enough for even Sidereals to start being leery of their chances in efficiently toppling them when necessary. These, Heaven tries to hire on as Directional Censors, effectively acting as the spiritual equivalent of privateers. They're the "Lesser Dragons" - taking on the role imposes the dragon-form. A Lesser Dragon is an elemental who was smart and powerful and active enough that the Celestial Bureaucracy actually offered them a
purview to get them on-side. A job with all the downsides of Terrestrial and Celestial duties, and one that involves actual dangerous duties vis-a-vis rooting out Wyld hotspots in the region and keeping local elementals in line, but
still. Scary. Think of Fakharu as one of the Shichibukai - an awesomely powerful pirate who signed on with the government, and so gets to freely act like a pirate in exchange for hunting other pirates.
Of course, if they refuse that offer they become targets for whatever retribution Heaven can spare, at which point they're best-advised to run for the Wyldmarches and live a less glamorous life on the edge of Creation, jockeying for dominance with raksha, Lunars and other oddities. It doesn't exactly help that the vital Essence of the Wyld is surefire way for an Elemental to bulk up... while also being a good way to get enslaved to a raksha noble as a pet, or go bonkers, or go from being a decent, honest fire elemental to being made from blue poisonous light.
Since "Elemental Dragon" isn't a natural part of this Elemental life-cycle, those that survive past this point develop into Reus-style giants as they reach higher Essence. Aside from basic Elemental themes, creatures who've advanced this far can't really be categorized into "species" in the manner of newborn elementals - they're entities like the subterranean Gemlord Collective of the South, or Hurricane Laloti, or Mother Bog. These are the sort of entities who look at the title "Directional Censor" and tell Nara-O:
"Censor? Foolish faceless god. Do you have any idea how much power I'd have to give up to become a Censor?"
It's the younger, hungrier ones in more precarious positions who tend to leap at the chance to become privateers. Which can lead to bitterness when it becomes apparent that they're now in a position to be resented by Terrestrials, condescended to by Celestials, and regarded as a traitor by their former fellows. Some of them shrug their shoulders and go "whatever", some of them throw themselves into their new duties to a degree that they earn a vicious reputation, some are so starry-eyed they don't even notice (this doesn't last long), some drown their irritation and regret in the pleasures of the Heavenly City.
This pressure is probably what drove Kukla to devour several thousand lesser Elementals through the course of his career as Censor, eventually developing into a beast so horrifying, so powerful, and so incurably mad that he was locked away (he's the only "Greater" Dragon, under this model - that's not a term, he's his own thing, just "The Kukla").
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Anyway, this gives elementals a clear role and process - they're freakish elemental wildlife, generally not (unlike gods, demons, ghosts) sapient, with their Charms worked into their "biology" to emphasize that. They're spawned to alter Creation as the seasons and dragonlines dictate. With a demon or god, you come up with a tool-nature or purview - with an elemental, you ask how they're intended to fix the world. This makes them easier to design - even if it means most will probably end up looking like
Pokemon. A species of Wood Elemental might be birds with leaf-wings who vomit a fireproof sap onto trees, or big lizards who squirt seeds from their backs to replant a forest.
It also gives "standard" elementals some obvious narrative hooks distinct from renegade Terrestrial Gods - if you're building a manse, how are you dealing with elemental interference? If elementals are being spawned nearby, what's about to happen? If winter isn't coming, where are the flocks of Air elementals? They take the common narrative link between animals and disruptions of nature and make them extremely solid - while reversing the chain of cause-and-effect, in some cases.
So with all that in mind, Summon Elemental doesn't summon an Elemental, but
creates a new one, by causing a calculated imbalance in the local Essence. This creates a spirit-familiar, an elemental beast who dissipates once you're done with it (usually). There's no particular problem with this - it's a mindless homeostasis-thing with no existing connections. Actually summoning an existing, specific Elemental is only possible in the same way you might be able to summon a god with a sorcerous contract.
If you still want to include the Great Elementals - though their only real worth is the part where the Gods bound them the same way they'd been bound, even as they grated against the injustice of their own yoke - then they were a control system devised by the gods and broken by the spiteful Primordials as war broke out, leaving Elementals to run rampant over Creation.
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That was the pitch I put forward, anyway. Posted it on the old forums a few times, talked about it with the devs on IRC. Obviously, I wouldn't have talked to them if I had a problem with my ideas being adopted - if indeed they were, rather than developed independently. In any case, 3e is handling elementals quite differently than I describe above - while it's got a fair bit of "spiritual wildlife" angle I focused on, it seems to aim more at the territory of youkai tribes, or the inhuman races in Zelda and some pulp explorer fiction. Exalted is largely bereft of other "races", so elementals is a good place to put things like tengu or gorons or cloud people.
...though that model doesn't seem to work quite as well with the new Summon Elemental. For those who haven't read it - it's exactly what I described above, which works fine with dragonline repair drones that sometimes go rampant, but doesn't seem to gel with races of people so humanized as to be treated more like weird foreigners than gods or demons.
