Why not just obtain the final aeon during the calm?
Like braska beats sin, that gives a few months to a year. Then sin comes back in like a year give or take, Why not just go on the pilgrimage during this time? Even if yunalesca won’t give the final aeon til sin returns, get the other summoning then just camp outside zanarkand for a while and obtain the final aeon when acceptable? There seems to be more than enough summoners to make that happen.
Edit: to some extent I buy “it’s really hard.” But how long was the journey? I’ve read like 3 months I’ve read a year, idk if there’s something official.
It’s hard to fully believe that it’s THAT hard to do the pilgrimage, a lot of the difficulty in ffx are circumstances other summoners won’t face. Also a lot of random people just walking around on the roads. You still meet the scholar in the calm lands. That being said, with the population as dwindled as it is, what I imagine to be a long amount of time and effort to become a summoner, the manipulation from the church of yevon, and the limited experience in having the calm in the first place it would be pretty difficult to make something like this happen even if it were technically possible.