Ripheus23

Some more guessing games...

The cosmere, over the ages, will almost certainly become a unified conscious/sapient entity. Part of this process will include whole planets acquiring integrated minds/souls/w/e. If Adonalsium had not been Shattered, then Adonalsium would have utterly dominated the emergent over-mind, and this is what Team Shattering objected to. The general idea was that dividing Adonalsium's power would allow for more "freedom" on that great and terrible day of cosmic Awakening.

However, having multiple Shards around each other posed an unusual risk in this regard. Like, it increased the danger of a re-assembly of the Shards, maybe not all of them, but enough of them to constitute a new candidate for an overly-dominant over-mind. Honor and Cultivation reasoned that since Roshar was more or less already as fully alive as the rest of the cosmere would be one day, their being there, though, wasn't so problematic. Rayse consistently disagreed, and had anyway come to the conclusion that by killing the other Shards, he could do the most effective thing to offset the whole danger of the cosmere's Awakening. Or, his Shard was volatile enough to want revenge for Adonalsium's killing, and so he was bound to eventually subvert the original purpose of the Shattering regardless.

Autonomy, then, is interested in arranging for a rather different outcome. The idea of her Avatars is to have personages in place who, during the great transformation, will be able to preserve their autonomy as much as possible. The current interplanetary/logical whirlpool of the various magic systems, which is a major component of what is evolving towards cosmic sapience, provides a great biological/evolutionary testing ground for beings who can establish and uphold their autonomy.

Ambition was openly, originally interested in being a dominant Shard, an over-mind candidate in some sense, which is why Endowment is glad to be rid of her. Uli Da, being a Sho Del and thus fainlife of a precise kind, had a wildly different theory about how the Awakening of the cosmere might unfold, though, so she probably thought she could handle whatever over-mind kind of role she was aiming for, or at least she might be able to come up with a way to do it if she worked at it for the millennia it would take for the Awakening to happen.

Ati and Leras thought that by making a planet of their own, they could guide the planetary-consciousness process more effectively. They had to impose an order of divine providence on Scadrial, to be Shards, something about being a Shard means thematically doing things like imposing orders of providential Intent on history. Inspiring religious texts, performing functional equivalents of miracles, etc.

Whimsy isn't worried if the cosmere goes all Alice/Oz mode. She's holding the part of Adonalsium that both knew and desired the idea of the cosmere transforming into a whimsical landscape of magic and mayhem.

... when Scadrial Awakens, it will be through an enchanted planetary AI system. This will reflect the Shardic artifice of the very planet in the first place.

Sel will come alive via its geographic magic. Nalthis already features actual Awakening, so, hmm...

Maybe on Vax, people aren't initiated by having cracks in their spiritwebs being filled in by Investiture or whatever. Maybe Vax is a planet that won't Awaken? Or it'll Awaken in some totally other way, who knows.

... seeing the future is so dangerous because the more that people throughout the cosmere do it, the faster the cosmere's evolution unfolds. By projecting their present consciousness across space and time, towards the future where the evolution manifests as an over-mind, people chisel away at the boundary between nowadays and "that" day.

Random guess: Bjendal is far on the path of Awakening; maybe that's how the "primary worlds" are ranked? By how close they are to planetary sapience? With Roshar as primary because it's already Awake?