Always a good read, Kagehoshi. Honestly, the real explanation is going to be the same old boring and mundane "limited resources". The choice of a Hive Knight tasked with tending to the local shrine of Oryx allows them to easily use the existing map for the new strike. Not a great answer but a large part of it. The story is also quite plausible and does add something to the Hive backstory at least. That tricky broad Savathun put a spy into Crota/Oryx's midst, tending to his Shrine, no less. Oryx finds out and "takes" him. Once Oryx falls, this same guy, who was never loyal to Oryx in the first place, tries to take the throne (pun intended) by channeling the old Shrine's power in some way. He is Hive, so his attempting to take over is both expected and desirable to the rest of the species. I don't know you could say the same about a taken emperor of another species. I agree that is much less interesting than bringing in an entirely new enemy but only lore nuts like us would have any clue who it was. Having to explain not only who it was, but how and why a Taken version of the emperor of some now-extinct species many light years away suddenly appeared in our system without being involved in any way with previous events is a little outside the scope of a small-scale strike the live team put together. A better place for something like that would have been inside the Dreadnought or the ascendant realm but this was all the tale of the greater Hive, Oryx's hive, not the powerful but nonetheless small contingent on the Moon. Bringing in all these other species would absolutely be interesting but arguably adds only a little to [i]that[/i] story. Edit: And why would/should we assume that Oryx keeps all these old champions around once he has destroyed their species? Sure, it's possible that singularly powerful ones like the Emperor Raven would be deemed useful but otherwise these species have been judged as unfit to exist and it would seem to me that the sword logic would dictate that Oryx consume them to feed his worm once the rest of them have been exterminated.