I liked the EA storytelling of the illithid powers growing. From what I seen so far--and hope it's wrong--is that you now, for some insane reason, decide to stick more and more tadpoles into your brain to chill. This pretty much killed any desire for me to explore the tadpole side of things. Because whomever thought it was a good idea story-wise, to put all this urgency in getting the tadpole out of our heads, even so much as throwing a bunch of people together that really have no interest in each other initially, just ruined it.
It was one thing to go, oh wow... the the tadpole isn't turning us. Oh wow, doing the psychic thing makes you stronger, and maybe the tadpole too since it's getting sated, let me explore this and see if at some point I might go, oh let me stop feeding it or get rid of it. But even after finding out that all the tadpoles are different, the expectation is still there that while you're not changing now, you might still and so you want to learn about it or get rid of it. But to make that jump to make the decision to put MORE into your head, just makes absolutely zero sense story-wise that we've learned thus far.
The only way I can see this not being stupid is if there was a story attached to why we're all of a sudden deciding it's a good idea to put more into our heads (and maybe there is, the Guardian might start talking to you about that earlier, like way earlier based on seeing the tree available super early). But even then, I will only even touch that if the story comes out and says something along the lines of "you insert this new tadpole into your head, as it burrows deeper into your brain the current occupant lashes out killing the new interloper and consumes it... you feel it grow stronger." I don't care if the idea is the more in your head, the more your brain is going dark and getting consumed. I'm not having multiples squirming about.
