"They respawned again, and then one last time, now with the leader of the Defiant faction there as well. They chatted for awhile, Alsbeth had some threats, the Guardian leader had the Vigil in the form of divine angels save the Defiant leader from Alsbeth’s attack. They moved on her; Alsbeth fled into the River of Souls, and the event was done."
This detail seems odd given how much effort Trion has put into depicting these two factions as diametrically opposed.
Divergent Paths
I don't know whether other games have taken this approach, but Trion opted to have two separate lore leads for the game's two factions. (The guys at Rift Watchers interviewed the two of them a while back if you're curious.)
The good news is that each side has a very distinct identity, with a person whose job it is to pull for them and make sure that their story is as cool as the other guys'. The bad news is that the lore sometimes feels disjointed, even more so than you would expect of what two warring factions would think of each other. From the earliest levels, Defiant content portrays Guardians as vicious short-sighted zealots, while Guardian lore depicts Defiants as reckless amoral maniacs. Even the game's opening cinematic shows a Guardian who is apparently willing to risk letting the Plane of Life have a foothold of Telara if it helps him beat a pair of Defiants.
All of which is well and good I suppose (assuming that people don't get too mean on Twitter, as Pete observed) until the minor issue arises that these two divergent stories are nominally occurring in the same world. There isn't really enough dev time out there to make separate raid content for both factions. However, if this and future content is going to emphasize the common threat of Regulos, Trion risks blending the factions, much as Blizzard has done with the Alliance and Horde (who also continue to coincidentally fight and kill the exact same foes, despite a cosmetic effort to reinvigorate the faction conflict in Cataclysm).
If this is indeed the trend, I wonder whether Trion will regret their approach to building faction identity.