More reading. My Kindle app is getting a respite.
When the powerful on Athas do something, they don’t go for half measures. This one spent 2000 years studying this. That one spent 3500 years studying that. Nothing can be accomplished in the span of a few human generations.
Which leads to my next point, the main point. So much knowledge has been lost over the span of thousands of years.
For instance, Rajaat learned how to use and alter the Pristine Tower from the remnants of the nature masters, who had just engaged in a destructive war with the nature benders. Only a fraction of a fraction of the knowledge of the Blue Age made it to that point. And now we’re down to the rote rituals of the Rhul-thaun (and what the Last Tree retained, the last survivor of refugee nature masters fleeing pursuing nature benders).
I don’t see how the heroes, even if all their enemies dropped dead tomorrow, can reverse what happened to Athas, even to the extent of returning it to a Hazel (mix of brown and green) Age. They’d have to reinvent the tools without the tools to make the tools.
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Or invent new tools, suited to the environment they’re in; Sun Magic, elemental pacts, all sorts of tools they could use or take advantage of, useful in turning the wheel.
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Sun Magic required the use of the life bending knowledge of the shadow people. (At least it didn’t require the Dark Lens…)
Theoretically possible to repeat, but probably only for someone who is working to free Rajaat. If anyone else tries to force them, the shadow people can just retreat back into the Black for a couple of decades.
I do think the exaggerated timelines from 2nd Box are silly and unrealistic. They are not well thought out, and leave versimilitude like the ancient Sumerian kings list, that speaks of monarchs ruling eons of time. Silly, and not believable. Centuries alone are hard to fathom. Expanding that to running millennia are difficult to accept.
Rajaat might have killed himself out of bordedom before waiting so many thousands of years…
For my campaign, I pursue more truncated timelines, if I can.
Sun magic required life bending the first time; inventing new tools can involve inventing new techniques, or rediscovering old ones.
They’re never going to recreate the old worlds, because those worlds are gone. But if you put things on a long enough time line… tens of thousands of years, like the canon one is… turning the Brown Age greener (or Greener) is possible.
Which is what heroes are for, and the people they stand in front of.
In that case, one of the preserver metamorphosis spells needs a variant to establish a link to the elemental plane of water (or rain).
Because Rajaat just gushing out water during the fifth book was just cool. 
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I think that might be an elemental cleric / character elemental thing rather than an avangion thing. Elemental water clerics can already gate water, it feels to me more like a super version of that (and a possible psionic enchantment for high level cleric elementals to research).
Rajaat’s Cerulean Storm form strikes me as more like a water (or rain*) character elemental, even though he’s an arcane caster.
*Prism Pentad doesn’t really seem to treat the paraelements as highly separate things.