This is the fundamental failure of Cauldron. They damned trillions of humanity to death or back to the stone age and worse, because they did not understand morality. Or faith.
Morals are not, as materialists are wont to suppose, merely an affectation to appeal to our primitive emotional natures. They are the tools whereby humanity navigates through places where his intellect and logic are too limited to see. And much as an airplane pilot must learn to trust his instruments before he trusts his ears or eyes or other senses, even in fact when those senses are all screaming the exact opposite of what his instruments say, so humanity has to trust-- has to have faith-- that those moral values really are timeless and eternal and true and that they will guide him safely home... even when all his selfish pragmatism is screaming that the easy way rather than the right way will produce more satisfying results.
Cauldron lost that faith. Bereft of that guidance, they fell back further and further on their own nearsighted, near-blind material pragmatism to the point that they put all their faith for the future in Contessa's "Path to Victory"-- which was in the end nothing more than intel provided by the very enemy they were trying to fight.
Never seeing that they took the easy Path, rather than the right one.
Had they simply had faith-- in right vs. wrong, in the rest of humanity-- if they had simply shared their knowledge with the rest of mankind to research, if they had openly provided their powers-in-a-bottle to all of humanity, rather than waiting and hoping that one of their unethical experiments or worse, some random Trigger would produce their salvation, their possible paths to victory would have increased ten thousandfold. But because they decided that they, and their Contessa, were wiser and better than all the rest of humanity, that they needed to abandon morality for cold equations, that they could ignore the instruments on their panel, they reduced their chances down to one bitter path... and in the end it was providence alone and the determination of one girl to do the right thing even with what few options their folly had left her, that saved Earth and all its counterparts from annihilation.
I see where you're going with this, and in some situations it would work. But not all of them.
You seem to have an unshakeable faith in humanity to do the right thing when it comes down to it. I'm not so certain.
Open-sourcing the tools to save the world would work ... right up until you handed them to a Jack Slash, or a Sleeper, or a Nilbog. Or, for that matter, to a Sophia Hess. Or a post-Sophia Emma Barnes. Or a Maxwell Anders. Or a Bradley Meadows.
There are those, to quote Alfred Pennyworth, who just want to see the world burn. And even of those who want to see it saved, many of those have strong views on who
deserves to be saved ... and some of those would dress it up in 'morals' and say "I am right, because my beliefs say that these people are wrong".
Would you, for instance, give Legend and Arthur just as much chance to survive as Taylor and Brian? Or would Lily and Sabah have the same right to live as they please as would Regent and Aisha? I seem to recall that you have a distinct predisposition against homosexuality; would you let that colour your views on who gets to be saved and who gets discarded? And if a good Christian man like yourself cannot be trusted to be
absolutely evenhanded, on the strength of your moral beliefs, then who can?
No, morals will not win the day, here.
Cauldron screwed up, yes. But they were dealt a crappy hand, and were constrained by what they had; secret access to a source of powers. It's very hard to let that go into the hands of others, to hand over control. And Contessa's PtV canonically averted a lot of crises from behind the scenes. So their sin wasn't so much in the execution as the planning. And even then, the data they based their planning on was crappy.
What they needed to do was get a good plan, then assign someone to carry it out who would not balk at the cost. In times like that, when the future of humanity is at stake, I would more likely trust a ruthless bastard at the helm than someone guided by an internal moral compass. Morality implies that there are things that you will not do. If I'm going to put my faith in someone to save me, I want to know that he's willing to do whatever it takes to get it done.
I was looking forward to this.
