I hope Capitano will be playable and I'm slowly losing my mind lol
I've been reading lot of the theories/lore/leaks lately and I was re-watching the 5.0 and 5.3 livestreams to see if there was anything I missed and I noticed in the 5.3 livestream when they teased upcoming characters in that one silhouette image they said(or at least the captions said):
"there'll be many more new faces for you all to meet, some of them are locals from Natlan, while others will hail from nations you're already familiar with, and there are some, as I've mentioned in the version 5.0 special program, who are closely connected to the very fate of Teyvat"
I thought that last line was interesting so I went back to watch the 5.0 stream again and noticed that in that stream where they were talking about who's important to the story, they seemed to be talking about Capitano. Taking that last quote line into consideration for what they said in the 5.3 livestream/upcoming characters thing, the fact they mentioned that specifically... I mean it's got to be what they're talking about right? It would be easy for anyone to assume the devs were talking about Skirk, but in the last part of the quote, they specifically mentioned that it was whoever that was talked about in the 5.0 stream which wasn't Skirk. Considering the archon quests up to this point and who's involved so far, that doesn't seem likely since the 5.0 stream was directly mentioned and the only one who was mentioned to have such an important role(other than the archon anyways) at that time was Capitano.
Plus, I also agree with that ongoing theory that the first Natlan trailer might be taking place in the future after current events because in the trailer they were throwing a ball for a tournament and there are a couple things in that trailer that point to that theory because:
Spoilers involving archon quests & Mavuika story: The tournament with the ball was introduced/mentioned in the Mavuika story quest after everything started to calm down after the 5.3 archon quest, Chasca was probably talking about her deceased sister when she said "I wonder if she's watching"(which I initially thought she was talking about the archon but that doesn't make sense cause they would know the archon is always watching the tournaments/pilgrimage so that'd be a weird thing to say). Not to mention that in the trailer Capitano is there and if that takes place sometime after the 5.3 archon quest, then it must mean that maybe what happens to him in the quests is undone or something, which would prove he returns.
Taking into consideration all the leaked files and the symbolism to rebirth/resurrections, I think it's likely he'll be playable in 5.x. If you think about it, in the 5.3 livestream when they talked about future stuff coming, they said "for this year of Natlan updates" right before teasing the upcoming characters along with that area Nod-Krai. They never teased a major region til it was like a patch away from releasing around the anniversary which makes me think that maybe Nod-Krai(while being part of the next nation) will actually be added in the 5.x patches and perhaps serve as a prologue of sorts. There are some other details like the fact the pyro gemstone text isn't fully revealed and the last line mentions a "he" which makes me think of either Capitano or Xbalanque since that makes the most sense. Plus if you think about it, if Capitano releases in 3 patches, it would kinda line up with the end of the 6 months that the other teased characters would be released by then and also be around 5.6 but we can only hope. Besides, in terms of what patches those characters will release, for all we know there could be 3 new characters per patch cause they have done that before and we all know how yikes this patch was with Mavuika AND Citlali being in the first half so what's stopping them from releasing the new characters in the same patches. All in all, I hope Capitano becomes playable cause I haven't been this hyped in a while for a character and unlike Signora, there's a lot of things that point to Capitano being playable and I REALLY hope that he keeps the mask.