As for finding a way to make her work, I thin there actually is. It's just about making her more pragmatic. She thinks of us as tools? Fine, lean into that. A warrior knows that if you have a good sword, then you have to oil it, sharpen it, generally take care of it or it will become dull and unreliable.
I see where are you going and i like the way you are thinking, but i still cant say i like the results. :-/
Lae'zel seems to me like the type who will take extra special care for her Githyanki gear ... bcs that is precious for her.
But if she will fight with regular (read Faerunian) sword, she would just use it until its dull, then throws it away, and just take another from nearby corpse ... bcs that is common, boring, easily replaceable.
And maybe im wrong, but i believe we are this sword for her ... she tolerate us, as long as we are usefull ... if we arent, she should throw us away without second thought.
But yeah, it would work better (as we talked previously) if delay would give her negative reputation, and at some point she would give up and leave.
Maybe we get the chance to read her mind and see her acknowledge that she's in a new, unfamiliar world and that much as she hates it, having natives who know the way things work is her best bet at this point. Something along those lines.
This is much better, that would actually make sense.
Also, having her confront our character and having our character actually come out on top in some fashion would go a good way towards addressing the problem too. It would make other people feel satisfied about 'putting her in her place' as opposed to her just getting to constantly talk down to us withonly fairly meager reprisal from our character.
Depends ...
There is many talking down to our character ... Lae'zel, Astarion, Tiefling kids ... its almost like Lariain enjoy provoking us, and then dont allow us to react to leach on our frustration. :-/
I would certainly enjoy option to challenge Lae'zel for a duel over leadership ... but i think that is all it should give, she would get reason to follow us ... i wouldnt change anything else, leave her snarky, let her still see us as inferiour, etc. etc.
I think another thing worth acknowledging is that I'm quite certain that most of the people who play this game will have never heard of Githyanki before and will have no context for them. I already sort of knew about D&D adjacent stuff and this game was my first experience of them. Beyond that, I didn't even learn much about them from the game thus far. The majority of what I know about them came from these forums and from a D&D actual play podcast where Githyanki are recurring antagonists who have Australian accents. So having her not be a perfect representation of her people isn't exactly going to ruin things. Larian has already demonstrated their overall lack of care for the setting and associated things with it. So if their reasoning behind Lae'zel's character is just about loyalty to the source material, that comes off as disingenuous to me.
Well, here you basicaly just say "i dont care" ...
What else can i say than "i do".
The thing is, this is a story, which works on story logic. And by story logic, being evil simply CAN'T lead to happiness.
I dunno ...
I would say that happiness is relative, aswell as is path to achieve it.
Its true there is not much stories, where evil character would actually win ... maybe bcs they are harder to write ... but just recently i have read fascinating serie of books named "Čaroděj" (probably just Wizard in english) from czech autor "Tomáš Dušek" ...
I will not spoil it, if you ever get your hands on it ... but i can certainy recommend reading it, bcs its protagonist is certainly VERY evil in almost any aspect i can think of ... and yet, in the end he seemed happy.
//Edit:
I have read it again ...
And i think i have located the core difference in our opinions:
things that do give them lasting happiness are things we associate with being good, like family, friendship, etc
Now, i would like to say that i dont disagree with this statement, per se ...
But it feels a little like you are forgetting, that theese things are cultural based ... and in Githyanki culture, those things are not just source of happiness, they dont exist at all.
Githyanki dont have family ... they lay an egg, surrender it to caretaker in Creche for hatching and training, and thats it.
Githyanki dont have friends ... even tho i believe some bond can be created in certain groups, Lae'zel herself told us that during the training she slain several of her cousins, just bcs she was comanded to do so ... if you are familiar with Star Wars: Republic Comando (paint on Sev's armor was made of blood ... but he never meet anything than other clones), that seems like good comparison.
Therefore their Values quite logicaly needs to differ.
I would say that for Githyanki being a good soldier, is compareable as for us is to be good parent, or child.
