Ok so after watching all the cutscenes again on youtube as well as all the terminals and reading this thread here is what I'm understanding (and I'd love to see some timeline/summaries reflected in the wikis): the didact changed when he tried to augment, and became way more vampire looking as a result of his attempt to get immunity from the flood. The didact in the council is way different looking than the one that got imprisoned. he is fundamentally jealous/unaccepting of what the librarian believes, that humanity was on their way to surpassing forerunner. his bid to not have to use the halo solution was his desparate play at 'keeping his jerb'. the whole plan to create prometheans started with making use of the finest warriors (are these same as war sphinxes from the books) but grew into his solution to fight the flood. compose organic warriors into prometheans so the flood cant change them. Smart actually. Of course, he is the -blam!- that went and got the devolved humans off the rings to do it. The plot of halo 4 is centered around stopping the didact from composing the rest of humanity, into more prometheans. Why does he want to do that? To prepare for a later battle against the primordial? To continue to punish/eradicate humans from usurping (not that much diff from the prophets' motivations) the forerunner? Striking out against his wife for choosing the humans as well? As for the composer -- why didn't cortana use it to do the reverse? download herself to human form. trade intelligence level for stability and longer life? What did the forerunner build the composer for in the first place? terminals show stuff way before the forerunner books right? so the story between didact/humans/librarian is all that happened before chakas and riser and bornstellar awoke him? seems to be right except she put him on requim versus on the earth where bornstellar found him. hmm need clarification on this point.