games

if she was just incompetent or uncaring enough to delegate to genocide-enjoying generals

Something like half the quests involving Altmer are basically "the hitlerite elves have such enlarged racism lobes they cannot help but plot to rebel against the liberal Ayrenn and do pogroms, genocide, or attempted omnicide." Ayrenn is a tepid liberal reformer whose hegemony relies on the willing violence of a bunch of self-defeatingly racist elven fancy lads, and any possibility of making the AD less ontologically evil died the second she decided to try to coexist with the omnicidal aristocrats as long as they agreed to let a few bosmer and khajit into their paramilitary country club, instead of purging the entire noble class and replacing them with bosmer and khajit loyalists.

That's right, she's basically elf Jimmy Carter: charismatic, affable, seemingly well meaning and empathic on a personal level, but entirely unwilling to wield power against entrenched blocs of ontologically evil racist monsters in the state's ranks and supporting institutions, and still ultimately willing to collaborate with maintaining the empire's hegemony abroad with the most grotesque violence including turning a blind eye to or rubber stamping genocide.

My hot take is that most of the community love for the AD comes entirely from Razum-dar being such a charismatic and memorable character and other factions just not having any recurring characters as memorable or enjoyable as Raz. Players like Raz and Raz worships the ground Ayrenn walks on, so some of that rubs off on the players too. I couldn't even give you a description of the equivalent recurring secret agent quest giver for the Ebonheart Pact, and I couldn't get into the Daggerfall Covenant storyline at all because Daggerfall is such a painfully generic and dull place that I rushed through a little of it then just got demoralized by how much all of it was bland and boring and went to do something else instead, so I don't know if they got any decent characters at any point but I've never heard of any whereas everyone knows and loves Raz.

Stanning any of the ontologically evil factions and their idle dipshit monarchs is bad and dumb, but if someone's going to do it the funny cat man secret agent has gotta tip the scales a fair bit.