So, the grand metaphor for Awakened society isn't feudalism like Vampire or gangs like Werewolf, or even communal storytelling like Changeling.
Being Mage, it's academia.
The Orders are the different subjects. Caucuses are different departments for the same subject, spread across different Universities. Consilia are the individual Universities' Dean, admin, and Research Ethics Board. Convocations are academic conferences. Legacies are the contributors to peer-review journals.
Everyone tries to poach one another's promising students, every high-up mage is competing not with the other mages in his own Consilium, but rival experts in the same Mysteries all over the world. Everyone tries to go to Convocations in interesting places, and everyone wants tenure.
Combine that with the common-law aftereffects of mages being walking lethal weapons who need means of settling conflicts non-violently (Consilium resembles nothing so much as a small claims court) and you have the essence of it.
On the Seers: The Iron Pyramid is, indeed, much more organized than the Pentacle for a variety of reasons. The political structures the Silver Ladder invented for the Diamond (that the Free Council grudgingly buy into) are based on individual mages being free to do whatever the hell they like as long as they don't conflict with another mage. Convocations are the closest thing the Pentacle has to a government, but even then if a Convocation decides, for example, that a Legacy is Left-Handed, it's up to the individual Consilia whose members attended to ratify that. Or not. The caucuses (individual slices of the Diamond Orders) have command structures, but the Pentacle stop there; the Guardian Epopt of San Fransisco is, as far as his subordinate Guardians are concerned, the head of that Order. The Guardian Epopt of Vegas runs her caucus differently, but when something crosses between their territories the two Epopts deal with one another as equals, and there's no "supreme Epopt" anywhere they can look to for advice.
Seer Ministries are like the Orders for Pentacle mages, but have one "caucus" for the entire world each - every Praetorian Seer ultimately does report to the Minister of the General, even if he will never meet her. The Seers have no Consilium equivalent, as when Pylons clash they do so at the command of their superiors so there's nothing to adjudicate. Where the Pentacle have Convocations any Pentacle mage can attend, local direction for the Seers is run by Tetrarchies, which are essentially very high-ranking Pylons made up of the chief member of each Ministry in a vast region. A Seer toward the bottom of the Seer Status rankings has a lot more certainty than his Pentacle cousin, and is given orders by whichever higher-up Seer has his leash. (And, if he's a Prelate, by the Exarchs themselves - where it gets really backstabby is when the Exarchs tell one Seer to do one thing and another something at odds with it) . But he can't *participate* in his Order's decisions the way a Pentacle mage can, until he becomes important enough to call the shots.
