FreeKaner
Prophet of the Dumpsterfire
I would even say that in P1 animancy was presented as fairly unambiguously awful. There was the business with Raedric, the friendly fellow in the sanitarium and the horrid experiments he was doing, finding out where wichts came from, and so on and so forth. The only remotely sympathetic animancers we met were either en-statued or dead and hanging from a tree. Aloth made a lot of sense.
It's only in Deadfire that we saw some of the other side of it, notably with Pallegina's companion quest.
I.e. I honestly don't see that the games were trying to "sell" animancy as unambiguous progress.
How do you consider Pallegina's companion quest positive side of animancy? I mean the guy seemed like well-intending enough but even he was agreeing that animancy should be controlled, I also said that it should be regulated at they very least. It's soul eugenics with a side order of psychology at its best.
I said it's trying to sell it that way because all arguments for it are about progress while all arguments against it are about safety. Not about what the people in the game world are saying necessarily. It's presented as a great leap with great costs, there is no "well this looks p. useless even when it's just being used to do good and is mostly being used to do soul reading to discriminate people or horrible experiments" or anything of that sort.