Can you use F&S bonuses for sponting? If so, I suppose that's a reason to use your discovery method. I'm not otherwise especially concerned about staying with canon in this department, though.
Scott
Oh, what was that bit about an optional rule in a supplementary book?
Scott
I used to allow them to be found via lab activity, and also used with spont and formulaic casting. It makes magi more likely to care what they are carrying, and also makes the substances more valuable. The change does make talismans less powerful though. A bonus of +1-5 isn't the end of the earth for spont spells in terms of the game outcomes, and I think its a cool flavour. If a player can just make them up with no effort in game at all, that seems broken.
I've given Petrus 6 aging points to bring his decrepitude to 2(0). We should start thinking about getting him training up an apprentice or two...
When I first read the S&M bonuses I, too, took them to be examples and not an exhaustive list, that everything and everything under the Mythic Europe sun had some sort of S&M bonuses associated with it (even if small ones). That seemed to make perfect sense in the context of the game as I understood it - the list was not that long, the Research Rules not in existence, and there were so many holes in the list that it seemed a reasonable conclusion (both in step with the RAW and to allow a wider playability for the Lab rules).
But when the "Breakthrough" rules came out, those were lumped in with other "limits" of things that could be researched but had not yet been. (The IG rationale being that, due to the Research needed, the Order simply hadn't been around for the time needed to cover "everything" - but I think OOG the meta-reason might also have been influenced to support the Research rules.)
Without rehashing the why's and wherefore's, I'd be all in favor of houseruling the former as the case here, that S&M bonuses are innate in everything and anything, and can add to Lab Totals (at least) without needing to be researched. So, if we agree that a dog turd as having a +6 bonus to creating bad smells, then yep, any mage can "enjoy" that bonus in their Lab Total without doing the season of work necessary to formalize that relationship.
Or, if that's a bit too open-ended, then instead we could just rule that there are hundreds of additional known relationships tbd, they just aren't all listed, so anything that might reasonably have been researched has been long ago (cuz, yeah, the above example might not be "reasonable" as far as that goes).
So altho' there is no listed bonus many common Shapes and Materials, nor for many expected Bonuses, almost anything "common" should have something attached for it one way or another, having had reason to be researched long before. Most common animals and weapons, most common materials (some possibly very specific, such as woods and plants, etc.), and all the Arts (some few are missing iirc) should be available.
Either way, if we, as a Troupe, decide something is too obscure, or if a Mage decides they need a bigger bonus than one listed or that we agree on, then Research is still available.
(As for Spont Casting... not sure. I kinda like the idea of magi carrying items as "casting helpers", but acknowledge that that limits those benefits of a Tali, which are already fairly limited as it stands.)
(And, yeah, I remember one particular long and absurd discussion on that before my hiatus years ago. My personal favorite was whoever argued that a "crossbow" was a cross, not necessarily(!) because it had the word "cross" in the name but because somewhere in its design there were 2 elements that crossed... somewhere... ignoring the fact that then by obvious analogy almost anything and everything was a "cross", from a bridge to a window lattice to crossed fingers to woven material... oy.)
You mean as part of character generation, or are you talking about for the last two years?
Scott
From the illness - I thought we'd decided to go with the decrepitude gain from his botched recovery roll.
Oh, I thought we were just going to give him one aging point (which I confused with a decrepitude point--ugh, I hate trying to remember all these arcane terms)--which I already gave him. 7 points (my 1 plus your 6) seems harsh: that's like several years of failed Aging rolls.
Scott
Just the one aging point seems a bit mild? He's only a grog, anyway, and it was a roll at a time when he could easily have died as an alternative.
I'd prefer not to make it generally possible to add shape/material bonuses to casting totals - seems too big a departure from the RAW for me to want to make it without good reason, plus it would add an extra layer of complication (in short, I don't think it needs fixing).
I know it harkens back to casting foci in ArM4, but I'm inclined to agree with Salutor, especially since, as iron noted, it would diminish the value of talismans.
Scott
Seems agreed on that point then.
And the S&M bonuses themselves? Infinite and self-defining, or just "(far) more available than currently listed"?
I think we can let them be infinite (it's a patently obvious application of the Law of Similarity), but I might suggest that things that have traditonally been associated with magic will be stronger.
Scott
All the above sounds reasonable, very happy with it for shape and materials as a HR
Unanimously approved. 
Unless you're talking about a very frail individual, 7 XP in Decrepitude is like a decade or two of aging. I know it was a bad illness, but that's too much--a Flaw would be much less debilitating in the long run.
Scott
I've just posted updated versions of the cats to "Companion Character Sheets". That means all of my characters are updated, at long last. The last bit of catching-up to do is to sort out the finances.
Incidentally, I haven't forgotten about your vis trades, but we'll handle those as part of the coming year's activities.
Scott
It's also the potential result of a single aging roll (albeit a bad one). I'm not sure specifically what you mean by a really frail individual? You only have to have decrepitude 1 to get up to 10 aging points at once. We can change it, but just the one aging point seems too mild.
How about we split the difference and make it 4?
Scott
This is something else I need to catch up on, isn't it? I mean, it was only 4 years ago....
Scott