[tab][/tab] :mrgreen:
Seems your real problem is not with the setting, but with the boons and hooks system. Have you considered ditching Covenants completely and playing the covenant in a more descriptive sense, without putting hard text on it? It can work, and has worked in the past, so no need to use the current system if this is causing a problem instead of solving one. 
I will get 10 bucks out of those (I assume perfectly legal) drugs.
I thought his problem was with the other players, not the Boons and Hooks system?
Not that drugs can't solve that problem too.
Yes, but I think that once we strip down the problem the thing is that they have iussues on boon/hook selection basiucally, because they see their impact as mandatory or only suggestive at most. Ignoring them the problem might simply go away.
My suggestion would be to probe further on why half the group want to play stories that will bore them rigid. The description of the problems makes it sound as though they want a more simulationist setting, where the natural consequences of events happen. Covenant Hooks are one of the narrativist elements of ArM; they are concerned with what sorts of story will happen, independent of "realism". (It's worth noting that it is hard enough to say what will happen in the real world in any given situation, never mind in Mythic Europe, with a completely fictional organisation composed of people with completely fictional levels of power and personal problems. I mean, Hermetic magi almost all grew up thinking that everybody hated them because of their special powers, and then discovered that they were right. Who can say what would "really" happen in the Order.)
Once you are clear on why they want to play those stories, you will be in a better position to look for a compromise.
... Wow.
So, on my request, the group met an hour early to have this discussion before the start of the session itself. I presented some of the ideas from this thread to see how they'd be taken. It didn't exactly go as intended.
One of the other players pointed out that changing the stories to the extremes of, for example, making all visiting Quaesitors bumbling incompetent idiots defeated the point of their inclusion as enforcers of verisimilitude. The troupe as a whole did agree to making more minor changes towards keeping the stories fun because the side in support of maintaining verisimilitude at all costs still recognized that we were all friends and committing a significant number of our hours every week to come game together, so there shouldn't be periodic sessions where part of the troupe isn't getting their time's worth. While perhaps not the total revolution I hoped for, it was a step in the right direction, so I thought of it as good progress.
My mistake. We got a little further in discussing the divide so that we could get a final resolution, and one of the players (who was in agreement with my stance) called the SG out on preferring realism to the fun and desires of their own players. Despite being having the same overall stance in terms of enjoyment vs. verisimilitude, I disagreed with this person and pointed out the argument mentioned on this thread about the fact that a Magus shouldn't be able to, say, murder thousands of people in a magical crusade and expect not to get Marched or face some other similarly bad consequence. That isn't necessarily game over for the character or a situation that it's impossible to bring enjoyment from, as there are sagas to be born even of wars against the Order of Hermes or the subversion and escape from said force, but the whole troupe would have to be running that kind of saga and the consequence would certainly still exist. There have to be reasonable consequences for the most extreme actions, at the very least; certain actions are, quite literally, only to be taken as a recession to the SG that stories must happen. Having friendly relations with a local lord of the region and selling a couple of magical trinkets at the fair is hardly worth several sessions of Quaesitorial deflection and could even be explained away with "oh, we're bribing the Quaesitors to ignore us in the background, now let's get to mundane politicking", but if you were to, say, become the court wizard of the King and use your magic powers openly to incredibly bolster his power across the entirety of Europe, that's pretty much asking for backlash unless the entire setting has been altered to have the Order allow such a thing. (And even then, there'd be mundane backlash... Though I didn't bring that up)
He responded extremely negatively to me in what he perceived as "betraying [our] side" and when the other members of the troupe were all in agreement with me, he got really offended and said that while it wouldn't jeopardize our friendship as a whole, he didn't really want to participate in our Ars group any more, and though we tried to dissuade him and backpedal our previous position, he had soon left, with one of the other players driving him home and then returning.
We debated half-heartedly for the rest of the hour, coming to a few other agreements (mostly to avoid debates spiraling out of control like that again) and then we had our session. Implementing the new decisions seems to have made everyone at the table happier with how the game itself is going (or, for the SG, at least happier that the players are happier...), but it was a really awkward session given how we had just lost a player.
So, yeah, that's how that went. I think I gone done screwed up. 
Replace "fool" by "entertain".
Start playing! Life is short! Have a feedback round after your sessions! 15 minutes have to be enough! If criticism of the storyguide is severe, the critics themselves should lead a session as storyguide. Let´s look, if they are better.
In my eyes, it is possible, that your problems end up in smoke if you start playing. Trash the Boons&Hooks rules and develop a covenant without rules. You´ll notice while playing what kind of actions are entertaining for your group.
Better a session not totally perfect than an endless discussion. This is just my point of view.
Chiarina.
This has nothing to do with boons and hooks (as I, too, had understood originally). It is indeed about player paradigm, what makes RP fun for them...
There are 101 ways to role play, and ever one is right - just not right for everyone.
You didn't screw up - you saved him wasted time and everyone a wasted evening (or more) in the future when he inevitably would implode his character and/or the entire game.
I've seen this - or something like it, to one degree or another - happen almost every time I've seen an established RP group introduced to the canon world of The Order in Mythic Europe. That player doesn't want the strictures of the AM "Order" - they want to RP the power without the backlash. This is a person who feels that an established (and effective!) legal system and a cause/effect backlash for crime is limiting how they can roleplay their character. In short, they want a D&D wizard in a small homlett far, far away from anyone else nearly as powerful - and this ain't that.
The game will be better without him, trust me. At least until he hears about the game and changes his views of what he wants out of it. Not that he's not a good Roleplayer, not that he's not creative or mature, just that he wants something that Ars is not, at least not in canon.
Shake it off, have fun with the game, GL, enjoy.
+1
You did not screw up. You handled it exactly right.
A game cannot be all things to all people.
You set out to reach a consensus and you did. It wasn't the one you wanted, but reality sometimes works that way.
On the other hand, you now have a group that is on the same page, and is very clear about that page.
GLHF