"The point I'm getting at here is, they're really smart, but part of their inherent nature also makes them really stupid at times. Up until the Exalted came along, they were powerful enough that nothing could really make them face the consequences of those stupid moments.
The Infernal Exalted were designed by committee.
The Neverborn, to put it very bluntly, have better Exalted for their purposes. They have all the time in the world. The Abyssals are inexorable world-killing weapons. They've got a nice control mechanism, but it really doesn't even matter if it works—the Neverborn think their Abyssals will kill the world even if they're trying not to. They were designed with a unified goal (kill everything), and it's a very simple goal (kill everything) that can be accomplished in an almost infinite variety of ways. It really doesn't matter how they do it. Just wind them up and turn them loose.
That's not the Infernals. The Infernals were designed by five bickering titans whose insanity works at semi-cross-purposes. She Who Lives In Her Name wanted, basically, super-akuma. This would have presented the same problems that already plague the akuma they have. She didn't care. She cannot care about anything more than a place for every thing and every thing in its place. She had to be ordered to stand down from the idea by Malfeas, and that only worked because her place is to do what he says. Malfeas, in turn, wanted to just scream and yell and beat the shit out of the Princes to motivate them, because that's how he motivates everything. He can't, on his own, conceive that them not liking that sort of treatment would matter. The Ebon Dragon, ultimate embodiment of backstabbing fuckery that he is, had to clue the Demon City in on the likely consequences there.
The Infernals are not an ideal design. And they're carrying out a decidedly non-simple goal. And they're not all that elegantly matched to the goal. Instead, they have carrots, and sticks, and these are applied crudely at various intervals. " - Holden, on the Primordials.
