I've plenty of opinions on the story of Dawntrail in Final Fantasy 14—it's a narrative that I enjoyed, but found more problems with the longer I sat with it. My biggest bugbear by far, however, was how it didn't quite prioritise its characters properly, leaving me feel some were underutilised at their best, and downright cardboard cutouts of their former selves at their worst.
That's not to say that focusing on a new cast is a bad thing, mind, but to keep things brief: I think you've gotta commit either way. Have your Scion buddies take genuine, thoughtful supporting roles if you want—or have them be busy elsewhere, but you've gotta pick one.
"We wanted to showcase all of the Scions, but we also wanted to showcase new characters, and we wanted to see what would be the response," Yoshi-P explains. "We wanted to see whether people would be like, 'Oh no, we don't want any more Scions, please, just get rid of them'. Or, on the other hand, people might be saying, 'hey, we want our Scions back.' … So we thought that we would need to do this [eventually]. And so in that sense, it was a challenge that we took on."
Keeping in mind that this interview was conducted via a live translator (and as such, doesn't convey the interviewee's sentiment perfectly) I get the sense from Yoshi-P that the Scion's roles in Dawntrail were a band aid the team had to rip off at some point—it just came off with a few split hairs.
As a FF14 player with a huge investment in its story, it's a relief to hear that. During Dawntrail's opening hours, I kept wondering why Alphinaud and Alisaie—both characters with plenty of relatable experiences to Wuk Lamat's own arc—were mostly silent when given the opportunity to have a heart-to-heart with her.
"As I mentioned before, showcasing some characters in a half-baked way is definitely not a good thing. So moving forward, we would like to be more dramatic in the way we create the story." The word choice 'dramatic' here could mean a handful of things—again, a quirk of having this translated to me in the moment—but as he goes on to explain, I think you could substitute that word out for 'deliberate'.
Confession time—while I am married to G'raha Tia in several of my fantasies, I do think a scene he has in Dawntrail, wherein he speaks to the player on a gondola ride, is a good example of how I wanted the expansion to use its returning party members. I mentioned this to Yoshi-P, and he noted:
