Is Holy Magic really that significant for the practical business of a demon hunter?
If you can conduct an exorcism, gain Magic Resistance, Faith Points and scourging from a relic, and potentially gain a handy power (or several) from a relic...what does Holy Magic really add?
You might be better off spending your XP in weapon abilities, infernal lore, awareness, etc. rather than sinking XP into holy powers.
Ah - here's the last time I had this discussion. No explicit page numbers, but it seems that everyone agrees that you can use TF like the Gift when it comes to learning Divine-backed supernatural abilities. (ie - you can learn the Supernatural ability like a normal Ability, albeit with a minor penalty.)
I'd say that the main abilities you could gain from True Faith are Sense Holy/Unholy, Detect Magic, and Ceremony. You also gain the option of easily absorbing other Divine-backed powers, in the same way that a Gifted individual can more easily learn Magic-backed supernatural Virtues.
I do agree that the actual Holy Magic Power/Methods are a bit pricey, unless you min-max your way around them with Ceremony. ie, only take a single level in each one that you study, thereby allowing you to study a multitude of them (assuming you have Sources for all of them) - and then use Ceremony to boost your skill roll. (Which admittedly does require that you know multiple people with Ceremony, of course.)
Which is the main reason why I tend to go Kabbalah when I do Holy Magi, as they DO have access to Sources for all of the Holy Method/Powers.
I've got it on RoP:D (1st printing, apparently), pg. 47, center column.
So, basically they can learn a Tradition's Supernatural abilities as though they were normal Abilities, rather than being Initiated. The whole "3 major, 1 minor" is just a reference to how Holy Orders are constructed - they almost all have 2 Powers and 1 Method (all Major virtues) and some Minor ability. The exception is Kabballah, which allows you to choose any 3 Powers/Methods that you want, at the expense of not having a minor virtue.
The whole "learn by osmosis" thing was implied by now a Hedge Witch figures out if she's got a Gifted student - they suddenly seem to know how to do a LOT of the arts, without being officially Initiated by them.
..which I must admit I thought of as distinctly different from 'may learn 3 major and 1 minor ability', to the point of the generalisation being misleading, in my eyes.
A Gifted Hedge Witch still needs to have her Gift Opened by her tradition to have favoured abilities; this replaces individual initiations. If she doesn't get her Gift Opened she is without favoured abilities, and takes a big penalty to learning new Supernatural Abilities (ArM5, page 166). So, if her Gift is never Opened she will really struggle to learn new hedge Arts/Supernatural abilities without being initiated (like an unGifted character) in those individual Arts/Abilities.
Hm. Well, htat's a -1 per level of ability to the Source quality, which must be Teaching or Training, and they'll have to get at least a 5 on the quality. If you assume the penalty from the Gift, that's a -3; a Gifted instructor would be an additional -3, and would likely drive the apprentice away with the combined lack of trust.
So it's probably going to be a -3 penalty to start, and working up from there. Average Quality from 1:1 Teaching is going to be (Com 0 + Teaching 3 + 3 + 6 solo) = 12; with a -3 penalty, that's going to be enough to learn 5 new Supernatural Abilities, assuming that the instructor teaches 5 different ones sequentially. Doesn't seem too difficult to me.
The discussion of teaching gifted Folk Witches is on HMRE, pg 44. There, it pretty much says the same (ie, the way you identify a Gifted student is by those that just learn Supernatural abilities without being Initiated, and then you hand them over to ungifted teachers), although it does re-iterate your comment about how being taught by Ungifted teachers is "difficult" due to not having Favored ablities - Meh. I'm not seeing it. There are only 7 Abilities anyway - assuming a moderately competent teacher (Com +1, teaching 3(+1)), they could learn the entire thing without having their Gift Opened, anyway.
Yes, it does require that you teach each skill sequentially, and only at 1 level each to start; but that's kind of how I imagined it would be taught by default, anyway.
The point of the discussion in Folk Witches is that if you don't know the girl is Gifted, you probably wouldn't teach her like this. You would probably teach her two or three Abilities to significant level: because if she's not Gifted (remember the witch thinks her apprentice is not Gifted) then each new Ability requires a new (relatively debilitating Flaw) to be inflicted. An individual UnGifted Folk Witch probably doesn't learn all her coven's Supernatural Abilities for exactly this reason: to learn them all she'll become a decrepit, cripple.
If you know that the girl's Gifted, then you Open her Gift and she gains all the coven's Supernatural Abilities while bypassing all the Flaws --- and therefore she becomes a much more powerful Folk Witch.