I like this part of the theory; from a world-building perspective, it never really made sense to me that there would be six “main” Elements; one would think that they would all be represented fairly evenly.
Perhaps Dume heard legends of the Toa Mata and decided that those six Elements should be the only ones allowed in his city. It would explain why the three main Toa Teams throughout the story all had the same Elements; the Toa Mata were more or less randomly chosen from the fifteen possible Elements, and then the Toa Metru and Toa Mahri were created from segregated populations based on that random choice.
Now, I’m not sure if I like the idea of Dume somehow being a bad leader (he always seemed pretty competent to me), but it would certainly make sense based on what you’ve said.
Even without reading the explanation, I support this theory. I’ve always wanted to see Marendar acting as an actual character, rather than a mindless drone. While there are multiple different ways this could be shown, having Marendar act against its purpose would certainly be the best way to show it.
The themes and explanation behind the theory just make me want to see it even more.
This might actually be canon. Greg has implied on multiple occasions that Energized Protodermis might not have always been sentient/sapient:
I also like the theory of the mangled Matoran Universe map being an in-universe approximation.
Also:
Yeah, this was me.