I like the new religious beginning, because it teaches us something we didn’t know before.
We always knew they treated helots like animals, we knew that they suppressed as well as oppressed, but I feel that the revelation that the church is something more than just a puppet of the empire is new information.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised before to learn that the empire made up the religion wholecloth, now it’s obvious a matter of co-opting it instead.
Plus seeing the brutality first hand, of someone the MC cared about, hits far harder emotionally than not seeing some random helot whose name you don’t even know get offed.
Also, I got an error when I got to my second choice “I hate how the helots are treated like animals” choice.
And their angels are helixes with mouths and wings? Do they serve a nuclear chaos in the middle of the galaxy that is attended by pipers?