Well… that kinda sounds lousy for 'Lightbringers'… no matter how good you are you're going to Hell. And it's always night.. no more sun, no more green things.. heck, no more color other than nightlit silver?
You're projecting your cultural preconceptions onto the situation. For the Lightbringers, the First Hell is considered a place of peace, rest and comfort, a reward for a just life well-lived. The full moon of Nocturna's realm shines on a land of great beauty, and the journeys into the Dreamlands provide a source of variety and excitement. And there are plenty of plants in the First Hell; they just don't have mortal metabolisms that depend on sunlight.
And there is absolutely no prospect of ascension to a higher plane… you've got one fate: Uncounted years of purgatory (1st hell) or misery (all the rest) until you get pulled into a spiritual Singularity?
Please see above. As I said, no one knows the fate of souls passing into Oblivion. Belief in reincarnation is quite common, and the possibility of being joined with the Divine Absolute is considered a type of "ascension to a higher plane". But the Lightbringer faith, like many RL faiths, is primarily about what you do in this life, not about what happens to you when you die.
Anyway, the Second, Third and Fourth Hells aren't all misery. Daedra aren't tasked with tormenting these souls, and much of the time they're left alone to associate with one another and seek their fortunes in a vast and eternal realm. Not wonderful, but way better than what the ancient Greeks presupposed for the Halls of Hades.
We…. really might want to look into that a tad more carefully.
The Hells have been part of the LB cosmology from the beginning, long before even the Starchild arc. The LB philosophy toward the afterlife is intimately tied together with their attitudes toward everything, and particularly toward the Ecclesia.
Heck, I bet the Aedra get awful darn lonely in their sparkling heavens
With thousands upon thousands of their celestial offspring around? Not very likely. Plus, they're frequently busy involving themselves with affairs on Earth.
while their faithful pack into Nocturna's realm like sardines in a can (consider it… there are 8 Hells to distribute all the bad folk, but only 1 for the good guys??)
A few points in response to this.
1.) Service to the gods is for this world. They offer no promises about the next. Lightbringers view the Ecclesia's flowery promises of heaven as a sort of slick marketing that they'll never have to deliver on, while the LBs see the benefits of serving their gods.
2.) The realm of the gods was not made for mortals, and mortals would not be safe or content there. This is a theme you see in a lot of polytheistic religions, but especially in the Greeks' Mount Olympus.
3.) The gods aren't all that attached to their mortal servants. Sure, they may appreciate their service and even like them, but they don't want to take them home for forever. Ant farms may be interesting, but you don't want the ants loose in your bedroom.
4.) The Nine Hells are basically a way of entrapping the souls of the dead in order to squeeze every last bit of magical power out of them. Ba'al let Nocturna create her place of peace and safety for the virtuous because he couldn't figure out any other way to trap souls that were that pure. (Nocturna's motives in the matter seem to have been much more compassionate, making the best of a bad situation.)
5.) The Hells are, in theory, infinitely expandable, so space is no issue.
6.) Realistically, there aren't that many truly good people in the world. The first four hells are full of people who are "more good than bad", the bottom four are the people who were "more bad than good", and the Fifth Hell is for those whose karmic scales are evenly balanced. Put another way, Hells 2-4 have extrinsic hardships that mirror the problems people already face in their environment, while Hells 5-9 have intrinsic hardships that mirror the darkness in a person's own heart (apathy, rage, lust, avarice, and pride).
I set out from the beginning to make the Lightbringer religion similar to polytheistic religions in the real world, and part of that was reexamining our preconceived notions about the afterlife. I wanted the LBs to be a very pragmatic religion that was based on "what have you done for me lately", both for the gods and the worshipers. I was interested in a setting in which the gods did not use vague and ill-described promises of future bliss to persuade people to serve them, particularly when they are so willing and able to demonstrate their power now. I wanted a setting with a more fatalistic approach to death — one in which the gods did not assign reward or punishment, but souls found their own fates through the weight of their own deeds. We're so used to seeing religion as "fire insurance" nowadays that we forget that most people, throughout history, have not seen their gods in that way. The contrast became starker after Matty introduced Catholicism into the setting, but I kinda like it that way.