I guess I just don't expect the Traditions to be pro modern infrastructure?
Most young Traditionalists, especially post-1999, are essentially post-technoparadigmists, rather than the pre-technoparadigmists who used to be their bosses. Their personal conceptualisation of paradigm is such that they view the world as "Technocracy paradigm + My Stuff On Top". This can vary from Tradition to Tradition [1], but... well, you know. Kind of hard to discard years of experience of "this is how the world works".
Indeed, RAW with a certain viewpoint of the setting, you in fact have to keep using the basic Masses-available technoparadigm until you hit Arete 6. Well, I mean, you don't
have to, but you're going on the fast road to Marauderdom if you change your paradigm enough that you don't believe that cars work because they're burning hydrocarbons, but instead work because of the trapped spirits bound into the engines
and then keep on doing magic based on that assumption and getting paradox because of it. No, even modern animists are going to believe that the car's spirit isn't the same as the car in a purely physical, materialist sense (even if the car as a whole is material + spirit, and ignoring the spirit misses important details).
... which does mean pretty much every Traditionalist who's younger than... like, 70 can steal some of the standard "generic" 20-to-30-years-ahead Technocratic gear and use it just fine. Because paradigmatically, most of them accept that smart rifles make sense, and so they can use smart rifle Talismans and Artifacts.
(Some of this logic is sort of the path that Jamelia is working along as she does her stumbling Arete 5 "I'm edging towards Arete 6" looking at the way the world works. Which has led her to the sneaking suspicion that Reality Deviancy is
really 'doing things which risk paradox because they're too divergent from the way the world really works', which means that she's having certain suspicious thoughts about the more techno-hardliner Conventions.)
[1] For example, Etherites are actually pretty rejectionist of the Technocracy paradigm in a lot of details - a lot more than the Hermetics, who have a pronounced tendency to go "yeah, Technocracy magic manipulates the base matter of the world; we use the world of forms and ideas and so overwrite their ideas when we do stuff". Etherites have more of a tendency to go "Aha! I disagree with all these particulars!"
Pre-1999, a lot of them weren't; when your organization's inner circle includes among their number genuine Iron Age pagan priests, it can be hard to admit that maybe the advocates of modernity have a point.
Almacia's most-recent life was in fact one of those genuine blood-sacrificing ancient archmage druid sorts, who died in 1999 when her pocket realm collapsed when it was cut off from earthly quintessence and the Avatar Storm came rushing in.
(Her Avatar spent the last four centuries or so bored out of its non-existent
skull, because staying in an unchanging bubble of Iron Age culture, living in harmony with nature and sending out minions to capture victims to sacrifice them for the quintessence to keep the sun coming up in winter is not its idea of fun. It much prefers being the innate human genius of a Technocrat who considers nature in
dire need of some improvement and who's flying around all over the Umbra rather than staying in one boring place [1].)
Oh, Dynamic Avatars of science-focussed Technocrats. They're always so... gleeful about being in the post 1999 Technocracy and getting so much NEW STUFF.
[1] And at the moment it's back on Earth, which is
great because everything is more interesting when there's people who don't agree with you around! And then it starts pressuring her to pester Elsa or Serafina to take her on a trip around London, even if it is unhygienic. It has decided that it really doesn't want her to lock herself up in some sterile lab, and that a certain level of unhygenic-ness is necessary.
