I will admit that I'm making statements based on my general impression over all of 5th edition treatment of faeries, not specifically what was written in RoP:Faeries, which I fully read only once when it came out. I do remember the statement you refer to. However, with time, it seems that that 5th have treated faeries as: they are all about a story/myth/legend that they are acting. They cannot change it by themselves. As a result, the line seem to me to have treated them as having no originality, no initiative and no free will. Just my impression, mind you, and I'm not saying it is a bad thing in itself. It just never resonated with me.
The RoP:F p.52 Minor Supernatural Virtue Highly Cognizant allows Faeries to actively seek out change by creative humans.
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I completely agree that being bound to something greater, or even having one's magic restricted, is not what I would consider fun in Ars Magica. Besides Criamon I also have a related problem with House Verditius and how being a member of the house damages one's casting ability. (Such a thing should go against the Code).
That said I also have to admit that in its proper context such a gaming style is fun. I have played L5R for years and the whole spirituality of that game's magic users are brilliant. (Yes, I know, that is Japan more than China, but it fits this because we are talking about similar foundational points on the magic divine nature).
On a related level I wonder if there would be a positive thing about removing the Faerie element to House Merinita and increasing its nature element. I say this as I never thought it was proper for a House of the magical Order of Hermes to focus mostly on Faerie rather than Magic.
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It's interesting how different the reactions of players to the same source material can be. Verditius is my favourite house to play, and the restrictions on their magical abilities is a big part of why - it forces you to think outside the box and really strengthens their theme imo.
Likewise I'm one of apparently relatively few people who not only loved 5e Criamon but would have liked it to go further down the same path. For me a character who is restricted in how they can act in the fiction is in some ways more compelling - real people don't always get to act out their personal ambitions and desires and have to put them aside for other things, and that's something that is hard to do and harder to stick to, which gives a lot of scope for internal struggle. It's a great source of pathos.
As for Merenita - I think the idea that what they do "isn't proper" is probably a fairly common sentiment for non-Merenita magi in the setting to express, including the nature focus remnants of the original Merenita traditions (who have a bit of a "no true Merenita" thing going on). Quendalon and his whole shifting of the house was really controversial. I really like that vibe and wouldn't change it at all.
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Generally agree with Argentius here. Adding a few restrictions increases creativity and fun. (adding too many restricts it again).
Similarly, I really like the feel of Merinita. Verditius was fun when I played it, but it was a downtime-focused play by post game.
I agree with both raccoonmask and to a lesser extent argentius.
I like the flavour of Merinita as they are, they serve the important purpose of being the fae house, same as Jerbiton is the mundane focused house (although I still think that Bjornaer got the best write up of the mystery cults).
The Criamon do not really do it for me, but that is not because of their restriction, but rather because I do not really dig their philosophy (Gorgiasts, represent!).
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I will surely make Ars 6th a subscription based game as D&D Beyond.
It will be a place to automatically manage all things related to character sheets, covenants, grogs... It will be a place where the community could share objects,covenants, books, antagonist, NPCs, house rules etc. I will also made a companion mobile app so you can have your character at hand at every moment. The app will also be an "Smart" dice roller to keep calculation out of the table.
I will strongly support Roll20, making an official sheet (the actual one is really nice BTW) and selling adventures and the rules in the Roll20 Marketplace.
I will have an official YouTube saga, with the best GM and players I could afford, making all the characters, items, covenant sheets available so the audience can follow the saga and get a grip on how the game is played.
For the physical game I will create props to enhance play. Spell Books with swappable spell cards, a way to resolve Certamen with cards, an spell calculator abacus, vis cards/counter...
Also expand the IP: certamen card game. The Schism War Wargame, Covenant Management eurogame (great ideas here) and don´t be afraid to venture Ars into other RPG systems. Magic Shoe for quasitors, Savage World for Hoplites, FATE/PbTA for initiation and even D&D 5th as Cubicle7 did with The One Ring.
And I will love to read Ars Magica fiction. Timothy Ferguson wrote a very nice story that was key for some of my players to get the feeling of Ars.
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What Shaamehd describes would be, for me, what would send me running away. 
I must be old-fashioned.
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While I dont agree with much of what you say Shaamehd, there are a some things I do like.
I would very much support covenant management as a minigame in its own right. The management aspect of ArM is one of my favorite aspects of the game but I certainly think that it could stand to developed more. Perhaps even to the point of being treated as a proper "game phase".
Likewise the Certamen card game certainly highlight what is for me an important problem. Certamen is too clunky and math heavy to be really fun. The idea of certamen is super cool and it feels like it should be really dramatic and tense but whenever my group actually tries it ends up with us just looking confusedly at each other because of all the modifiers that need to be added and recalculated each turn. Usually we just resort to resolving certamen with a single die roll because it takes too much time otherwise. A card game is a potential route to making certamen more fun and dramatic as I feel that it should be.
Generally I would support anything that makes the magic feel more like the central focus of the game, and in fact makes the magic into more of a game. Like a game mechanic for work in the laboratory as suggested by David Chart in a related thread.
I really dont think that making a super prop heavy game from the get-go is a good idea as it drives the price up.
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I will try to elaborate in the next days, but for me Ars Magica 5 is about Accounting Magica. The Are part has long been forgotten. I crave to bring that back and cut heavily on minutae and long clunky formulas for everything. The maths detracts from the fun. Heavily.
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Maths can never detract from the fun! Maths is fun!
Bob
(maths and physics teacher....)
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Indeed... if you make an ArM computer program with all the maths. But it should not slow down play as it does right now. Spontaneous magic is a really good idea but it really slows down instead of being a fast way to resolve things as it should.
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I get what you are saying, but that limits the appeal to so very many. Interacting with other people is what is fun. Otherwise we woulld just play video games. Tabletop RPGs, all of them, are a structured social activity. We are not all teachers. Some of us, such as myself, are uneducated minimum wage workers. A good RPG is supposed to create a level playing field, so that plebeians such as myself can consort with the inteligencia and, for a short while, feel like we are equals.
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This sparked some additional musings this morning.
Art is about making decisions on what to exclude as well as what to depict. In this way, perhaps, 5th edition has drifted away from a clear focus. We've seen the addition of more and more peripheral elements of the game (commerce, academia, exotic sorcerers from more distant lands, other Realms) with additional mechanics for all of these, the introduction of new customs in every Tribunal (some with new mechanics as well), the detailing of each House (with some heavy mechanics for some), etc.
This has created something I will call an "IDIC syndrome". (IDIC stands for "Infinite Diversify in Infinite Combinations", a major element in Vulcan philosophy from Star Trek.)
With all of this diverfity and all those combinations, 5th edition has lost some of its focus. I think a 6th edition would need to restore that focus -- it is a game about wizards and their magic, in a semi-historical european medieval context.
While exotic sorcerers from distant lands, faeries or demons make great opponents (or allies), the game isn't about them. Make it easy for the storyguide to create and run them. The same applies to commerce, academia, and all the peripheral elements of the game -- make them easier to deal with, because it is often the storyguide that has to deal with those. Every hour he/she needs to spend detailing the stats for an NPC, or doing spreadsheets to deal with the covenant's finances, is one less hour to work on the stories.
The same applies to new players. If the player willing to try the game needs to spend 4 hours creating that first magus, that's 4 less hours enjoying the game itself. One should be able to create that initial character in 30 minutes and understand the basic rules in 30 minutes. So what if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles right away? After an hour, one should be up and running, roleplaying that first story.
That is what 5th edition no longer offers. It has so many options that complex has turned into complicated. A 6th edition can return us to a better focus.
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The fundamental conflict is that while a lot of people like playing mages, a lot of people don't. And while you can get together an ars magica group and know that everyone will like playing a mage, if you have a group together that sits down at an actual table, odds are at least one person will want to play a non mage. Which means either they create a lab rat for background, have to go through the math of running them in the background, and take a companion that they actually play most of the time, or they have to have a mythic companion.
Which means more rules, and more systems, so they can have options.
So either we accept the paradox of these competing issues or we have to great a more generic system, where a sword wielding hero or a thief can be the equal of a mage, through whatever mechanism, and more importantly can be equally enjoyable characters.
5th edition handled the paradox by embracing complexity in a sort of "no preferred frames" approach to cosmology and mysticism once it got past the inherited issues from previous editions regarding things like religion and auras.
I enjoy complexity, often for its own sake, but I think if there were to be a 6th edition it should focus on becoming more generic, so a GM can easily create a faerie, a Djinn, a dragon, a new magical tradition, or a society of assassins and not have to choose between rules systems or create new rules systems to do so.
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I have to say that from my empirical observation, I am yet to encounter a case where someone did not want to be a mage.
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Do you play off line? Because for me it has been an issue with every group I have ever played with that was not formed expressly to play ars magica.
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I'm on the same page as Medusa here, the issue of someone not wanting to play a magus as their primary character has never come up. If anything the opposite. This with long standing offline groups who existed before we started playing Ars and with no one having any prior experience with Ars (offline-ish, formerly offline we now play over discord and Roll20 because we're a bit more geographically spread out than we used to be).
I vaguely recall the pitch being along the lines of "a game set in medieval Europe but everyone plays a wizard" so if someone had said 'not interested in wizards' I don't think we ever would have started playing it.
That said I can definitely think of some people I have played with in the past who would not have been especially keen on playing a "magic-user" even if that's the focus of the game system. Depends on the individual group I suppose.
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That is why I didn't play Ars magica from 1996 to 2012- I couldn't find a group where everyone was interested in playing a magic wielding character. Welcome to Kansas.