I've been mulling over this all week and want to get my thoughts down before the finale to see how much we figured out and to hear some final theories in response.

For expediency, I'm going to refer to the Elliott that we've followed through most of the series, the one who wears the black hoodie, as Hackerman. I think this is an apt name, because he's not the original Elliott, but a sort of hero alterego who avenges people with hacking, and who's been experiencing a lot of Christmas miracles this season. The real Elliott is the one who lives in the F Corp reality, still works at All Safe, and finds his safe life to be boring. What he experiences may not be full reality, but it appears to be closer to it than the world of Hackerman is.

We know that Hackerman has delusions, but they're based in reality. We've seen more than once that he experienced something that really happened, but differently than it happened, e.g. going to prison, or has been an unreliable narrator. We also have some meta-contextual clues, like the one from Leon that the show probably isn't all a dream or something someone imagined (no snow globe ending), but has some basis in reality. It's also been said by the show creator that it's not going to have a sci-fi ending, but be about things that can happen in real life, now.

I started watching the show because I thought that it was about computer stuff, but over the course of the show, it's revealed that it's not exactly about computer hacks (although we do see realistic depictions of that), but that's a smaller element that's part of a larger theme, that's about something more like mental hacks. This is about dissociative identity disorder (DID), and how it's akin to running daemons. I recently saw a video where someone described DID as being like a computer running programs: each personality is a program that has a purpose that it's serving for the greater system. Mr. Robot is drawing on a similar metaphor with the IT security/hacking theme. Hackerman and Mr. Robot are personalities that IT worker Elliott uses (although he doesn't know about them) to deal with his issues. Identity and using it as a tool is a theme of the show.

How exactly has Elliott been dealing with his past and issues through Hackerman? That's what I've been mulling over, and I don't have all the answers, yet. That's what we're going to see more of in the finale. What we saw in 4.11 eXit was what's been going on in reality for Elliott while Hackerman was seeing something different -- there were a lot of parallels between episode 1.01 & 1.02 and 4.11. Basically, they were alternate versions of the same experiences.

There's also something to the Alderson loop and time travel themes -- part of Elliott is stuck in something that happened that he can't confront and can't change (it simply doesn't exist to his conscious mind, because it would mar the safe life that he has), so the alters are doing that for him. These issues are something to do with the people who are dead/missing in one reality, but not the other. Elliott and Hackerman have been operating in parallel but disconnected lives, which is why there's a theme of alternate realities. They're experiencing different versions of the same reality. Hackerman knows that he has DID and delusions, but Elliott does not. At the end of 4.11, Hackerman made a breakthrough to Elliott, and is now making him aware. They may finally experience integration, or maybe their separate loops of reality may continue.

Apologies if any of this is too obvious. I wanted to get my thoughts down on this one last time.