I think you're sidestepping the issue a bit. The hard problem of consciousness doesn't say that consciousness has to be better as a value judgment, just that it

I think you're sidestepping the issue a bit. The hard problem of consciousness doesn't say that consciousness has to be better as a value judgment, just that it... is. Saying that it's an emergent property of physics doesn't address the problem. Sure, any old combination of atoms can randomly become conscious if they get lucky, but what does that mean? And it is a hard problem: how do you even define subjective consciousness non-circularly? "Consciousness is the state of feeling like something" - okay, but what is it that's doing the feeling?