And Anton or Duncan would have been a better choice?
Duncan, no. Anton, perhaps.
Anton was driven by lust for power and a desire to avenge his academy buddy Crawford so much so that he made a backdoor deal with the devil.
That was just the final straw. You may remember that Janos and Anton were a tag team when they started their careers. Janos was supposed to handle the politics to repair the damage Stephen Marik did, while Anton was supposed to handle the military. Not only did Janos fail to make headway in politics, he resorted to using a practice like military execution to set an example. Good jorb. Anton dealing with Max Liao was bad in the context of the the revolt's civil war. Had he won, a closer relationship with Sian might not have led to Janos style passive aggression in the 4th Succession War or the Andurien Crisis, which was caused by the weakness of the CapCon in the face of Janos's decision to not help his ally. We don't know if that is true, but we do know what Janos did in the remaining years of his reign. It leaves tremendous amounts of room for speculation that yes, the League might have been better off.
By the way, one of the reasons Anton lost the war was Janos bullying Regulus and Andurien into action late in the revolt. He couldn't court the Regulans back to being Marik loyalists, couldn't fish Andurien out of their self impossed isolation, but he could bully them into contributing forces when his own brother decides to overthrow him. What a stellar guy.
Duncan was just a glory-hound who took credit for military success from his underlings; even as poorly viewed as Janos was by most of his contemporaries, Dame Humphries was dismissive of Duncan and his strategic sense in comparison to Janos.
I'll give you that Duncan was not a good replacement, and that his methods were wrong. But, I agree with the idea that Janos was unfit and unwilling to let his grip on power go. Janos comes in dead last on my list of bombing victims to mourn, even behind his nutjob son. Even in a crippled state Janos wasn't stepping down. Even after causing the crisis, he wasn't stepping down. Instead he brings in his son Thomas, with no military background to act as a mouthpiece and undermine FWLP's authority in order to solve a problem he himself created.
Basically, one's a murderous traitor and the other is a murderous traitor who didn't know what he was doing.
And yet i'd prefer either one to Janos. If only because what comes afterwards is unknown, whereas the later years of Janos's reign were a disgrace. Dictator for life! If Crawford could be executed for incompetance Janos should have been tied to the same post.
Frankly, I'd have rather Janos cancelled Resolution 288 and let Parliament take over than have let either of those two sit the throne.
That'd be pretty sweet, right? No more First Lordship ambitions from the Marik dynasty to push the League into pointless devastating wars. BT doesn't have happy endings, though.