All the people fighting against you felt pointless too, especially the teachers. Like, does everyone forget that they're holding Elise and Tio prisoner here? How is it "fighting for the honor of the main branch" if you're literally fighting to keep two girls from gaining their freedom?
Eh, I think it's pretty clear they knew deep down they were going to lose. They specifically waited until Cedric and Shirley left to intentionally leak the info that Tio and Elise were there. I actually think the Instructors have a better reason to fight, at least Mary and Makarov. They're clearly trying to limit the use of the Zauber Soldats as much as possible in the course of teaching the main campus but presumably they have to keep up appearances and try to stop Class VII or else get replaced by someone who just doesn't care that they're literally curse indoctrination machines. They frame their participation more as backing up their students which - yeah, is silly - but there was definitely some mention about that issue so it felt like an undercurrent as well. Like Class VII said, this was basically Dreknor 2.0 where the Main Campus clearly wanted to lose because they know they're the bad guys but they still tried to stop them because if Class VII could actually be stopped by them then there's just no hope.
As for Schmidt he's literally an asshole who doesn't give a damn about anything but his research so he's the one person in Zemuria who can pull off his actions here
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xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?