As The Drode says in Megamorphs #4, The Ellimist stacked the deck when he picked the Animorphs.
You have the son of Visser One's host, Elfangor's brother, Elfangor's paradoxical son, and Cassie, who is an anomaly who is timeline grounded, meaning she disrupts any timeline that tries to take the place of the true timeline. That's the book where in a moment of weakness Jake takes an offer from Crayak and the Drode to change it so that they never walked through the construction site the night everything started. This leads to the deaths of Tobias, Marco, Cassie, and Rachel in the new timeline, but Jake and Ax still manage to link up despite not knowing one another and kill Visser Three and are about to destroy the Pool Ship before The Drode stops everything and throws a tantrum that this timeline is even worse for Crayak than the original. Cassie while she's alive in this timeline knows it's wrong and is the only one who vaguely remembers it when things are restored to normal.
Yeah (just reread that one btw it was awesome) but my point was J and R were random picks and ended up being the most important by the end, hence there was a lot of playing as they went by Crayak and Ellimist and they still dealt with a fair amount of randomness as much as both tried to stack the deck.
