Yup. That's why I made the house rule I made. Since you then have to increase Might to gain Qualities, low Might isn't better than high Might.
I like what you've been working on. Just the earliest incarnations were too easy to abuse. I do like some of the age-related ideas, as we tend to think of ancient dragons being more powerful than younger ones, for example. The age-related ideas, along with deprivation for not being in a sufficient Aura, may handle that nicely.
I would be cautious about allowing magi to provide too much of a benefit without the Familiar Bond. Otherwise the Familiar Bond loses its value for the Familiar. I like retaining Transformation for Familiars so that they mostly just gain on the power end of things by forging the Familiar Bond. They should gain for likely sacrificing immortality and giving up a lot of autonomy. Gaining immunity to Acclimation and Ability advancement without Might penalties does it, but if they're also penalized by not being able to do Transformation, that's a lot more sacrifice without any more gain. And then if you go a step further and allow magi to help a lot already, there is even less gain by forging the Familiar Bond.
Ya, I don't like familiars getting transformation. You can enchant the familiar bond, If i want my familiar to breathe fire I can just do that, no more rules required.
My group made an acclimation system to allow for partial resistance from several sources. So you could have time in an aura and cast your powers on mages in the same year and have them both contribute instead of it being an all or nothing thing. We had talked about the ageing system being triggered by your over-capping your acclimation by some amount. So it wouldn't just be time based and it wouldn't be just vis based.
The familiar bond doesn't have to be that beneficial for the critter it just has to be more beneficial for the magus. The order would stop bringing in Errant Familiars or what ever if they didn't have a steady supply of familiars. I was already planning on allowing them to act as normal lab assistants instead of free ones like familiars and their chords don't benefit a magus who holds them.
In truth I was writing a whole narrative for this new Errant Familiar thing to be for Familiars who's masters have died, which would clean all that up pretty concretely.
My point is that many Familiars are already intelligent, and why would an intelligent being choose to severely cripple themselves for no gain? If the intelligent familiars are better off doing a different thing than being a Familiar, then most likely they would choose not to become a familiar.
Yes, if you get rid of the likely loss of immortality as well, being a familiar isn't nearly so crippling.
That means that the effects gained have to be either low level or within the magus' area of speciality.
The familiar bond is also limited in the type of enchantments you can do - only ones that affect the magus or their familiar or both. Theoretically you can get round that by using the "given an animal a magical ability" guideline, but that's a) not very well defined (as a recent thread discussed) and b) means you have to be good at MuAn(Vi) in addition to whatever other requisites are required.
That said, whilst I've seen it in character creation I don't think I've seen a familiar use transformation to gain a new power in actual play, so banning it may not have all that big an impact in actual practice.
grin Your 'every bit of that is going overboard' and 'theoretical optimization' is my recommended approach, especially for players new to the game.
Having a Casting Total in some TeFo >= 25, and in some Focus >= 50 introduces a player to important aspects of the game, in a way that is useful rather than theoretical:
A reasonable range of fatigueless sponts at a useful magnitude (5 for a TeFo, 10 within Focus.)
A pleasantly wide range of useful fatiguing sponts.
Access to good formulaic spells within one entire Form and one entire Technique.
Some real power.
Niche protection, based on choice of TeFo and Focus. Every character can choose the same Virtues yet still play very differently.
Real Flambeau can incinerate a Faerie right out of Gauntlet.
OK, I just did a whole 5 page, ground up, rebuild of the system. I think it will work. At this point I will be happy with Low-Might Creatures took a nerf and Mythic Companions fall between Mythic Redcaps and Magi.