I don't think there would be more drama if you made empowerment and cabal induction reachable by a player himself. And if an immortal is active then they can snoop and do impromptu discussions about their religion with their follower. The drama you mention is generally after people have been inducted and those that tend to create drama are usually those that play for 6 hours a day and have no problem passing their 40th battle interview.

I think this would be a lighter workload on the imms and leaders and while I'm sure there have been moments where the actual induction/empowerment process has caused drama I feel that most of it is because the imm/leader is unavailable. Currently the system is designed with certain tollgates or bottlenecks without any requirements for availability (naturally since all are volunteers). This means that someones character progression could suddenly come to a halt (or never take off) just because the imm that they are dependent on is swamped at work and does not log in for a month. And if you as a player have a fulltime job + family and few gaming hours I can understand how that kind of game design can be frustrating.

About Silent Tower; it is not that big of a deal for some and for others it would be a bigger deal because it is one of the two biggest challenges when it comes to areas. It is a very cool area and I would love to spend more time there trying to figure out stuff.

About Maran; mostly just feel that it is newbies and people who play and weird times that (possibly) get screwed and that it is pretty unecessary. From a player perspective it is just a hurdle you have to jump through to get your full powers to fight all the others who most likely have full powers. And that hurdle is again dependent on imms.

Edges; They are probably in a fine place now.

All in all I think making things more accessible (or reachable by yourself) in CF does not mean it becomes a nice place. It would be a big shift in mentality though; more towards Eve Online and less D&D with a dungeon master.