With the caveat that my understanding of WOD comes from Panopticon Quest...
The Traditions seem like very selfish groups to me. Does any one of them have, as part of their ideology and mission statement, any provision to help the masses? A feasible plan to do so? Is this plan better than the Technocracy's? They're groups that demand the right to practice their magic as they like, heedless of any impacts this may have on the world or people around them, and go ballistic at the thought of any restriction or oversight. They're mono-focused on themselves, so blind to their own privilege as a mage, they construct their own story of oppression and demand more privileges.
If the Technocracy is Kipling and the imperialistic white man's burden, then the Traditions are the white libertarian men, the ones who believe there's a war on Christmas or who take over federal buildings in Oregon.
I know that some of the Traditions seem like they're set up to be the indigenous peoples who get crushed beneath western 'enlightened' civilization, a la Dreamspeakers, but that's not the tone or feeling that takes place when people defend the Traditions. It feels hollow. Inevitably, I can't help but feel that the Technocracy, for all its warts and faults, is probably a nicer place to live for anyone that's not part of the overclass than one run by Traditions.
The Traditions don't like each other. They're forced by the Technocracy as external pressure to work together, but I don't see one Tradition mage not believing that the other Tradition mage is doing it wrong. If they believed that shallowly, the Traditions would have melded into one style already rather than insisting on maintaining their own (and looking down their noses at everyone else). So, a world where the Traditions win, is a world that's split into fiefs and with skirmishing going on.
I can't think of a Tradition that I'd trust to 'run' society, a place that'd actually be nice as one of the masses to live in. I'm sure it's relatively fine as a member of the ubermensch, but the likelihood of being such is ... low.
The Dreamspeakers and Verbena are luddites. I like nature, but I don't want to live in the natural world 24/7, shit in the woods, bathe in the rivers, get bitten by a ton of insects, and probably subsist on either a hunter-gatherer or small agricultural diet. Piss off your lovely mother earth goddess witch, and you probably get your heart ripped out or sacrificed to bless the fields. Do we still have running water in this conception of reality? Gas or electricity?
The Euthanatos and Akashics feel like they'd be most similar to the warrior monks of old, and Hermetics the wizards in their tower. Powerful, implacable, inscrutable, and oh yeah, they probably kill people at will with no oversight nor justification to the poor peasants you are if you meet whatever arbitrary standard they've decided. Don't pay enough respect, get punched into oblivion. Who do you turn to for recourse here? Are there courts to file suit for wrongful death or is a justice system some Technocratic construct? Do you plead to your utterly terrifying local chantry leader? What if by some crazy mage cult standard, it was justified because of something something karma bullshit? I mean, in fantasy books, this sort of thing is normally portrayed as a dystopia.
Adepts and Sons of Ether are pretty mad scientist. Is your day lacking in explosions? Strange experiments running amok? Maybe a world of laissez faire capitalism - and if you got snookered into paying your life savings in desperate hope for a cure, well, you should have done your research on the Digital Web and then determined if it was true on your own, never mind that the VAs can run circles around everyone there so it was never a fair contest in the first place.
And for all that, the Celestial Chorus-led area is still probably the scariest. Because if there's one thing we all missed, it was probably the Inquisition. The days when the Church ran everything from birth to weekly prayer meetings to blessings or advice on any endeavors, commercial or private, to marriage or even burial, it really makes me nostalgic. And of course, good parishioners would love to volunteer to join the Crusade and defend the Holy Land from the unbelievers who will tear down this magical theocracy utopia.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that the Technocracy, paternalistic, imperialistic, flawed as it is, is the only group interested in helping the masses* and the only one that will provide a standard of living that doesn't have arrogant mages storming through and ruining your life on a whim.
[* Don't kid yourself. We're all going to be the masses getting trod on underfoot in that brave, new world. And even if you were awakened, why are you so selfish to focus on your power and privileges instead of ensuring a decent place for the vast majority of regular people?]
