Sorry if I'm going onto an overly touchy subject on the board but I've always been confused by the sometimes extreme possessiveness I see from elf players for elven lore before the exile.
On one side, some of the most aggro nelf fans seem to be completely adamant that since nelf mages were retconned in Cata (and it's hard not to feel like it was a retcon when the Edre'thalas Quel'dorei were basically chugging as much demon blood as the sunfury before Cata), this means any claim to the highborne falls on them, despite multiple elements of thalassian culture keeping that memory alive too, which wouldn't be hard to do when just one king of Quel'thalas ruled the country for nearly half of its entire history as a political entity, and the highborne who rebelled against Azshara included its first king.
On the other side, some of the most aggro belf fans will simply claim that the night elves have no right whatsoever to highborn heritage because of the exile, even though afaik the lore seems to have strongly implied that highborne weren't that hereditary at first (Illidan was after all the brother of the first elven druid and seemed mostly on the highborne/arcane side), and I realize some of that largely came about because of one bit of story writing that I realize is a bit touchy with the devs needing to shove everyone into factions.
In all that I just find myself asking myself: is there a point to be at each other's throats other than the bliz writers deciding that they have to write stupid shit everytime they realize they wrote themselves into too much of a corner by making the various elven nations too friendly across even faction lines (case in point Suramar, which early on struck me more as ribbing than anything else, and maybe I liked the idea that maybe it was the kirin tor humans who were irrationally afraid that things would blow up, or Trueshot Lodge starting out as basically an elven story, or heck TFT showing little sign of active hatred; the way Wrath introduced the SC always bugged me even though I like Vereesa as a character with flaws, without her codependent relationship to a writer self-insert)
Are sin'dorei, quel'dorei, ren'dorei and shal'dorei really threatened by acknowledging highborne elements that slithered their way back into the kal'dorei?
Are kal'dorei really threatened by the various highborne nations and factions not being reduced to portal bots for their respective factions or an excuse to use one of the most battered races on Azeroth to tell low effort civil war stories and having, like, their pre-exile history acknowledged?
Can we not all unite in the ultimate truth, which is that elves are good and Aethas Sunreaver is an idiot?