Hugo was employed for, what, a single turn, using collage favour.
Permanently hiring him as an employee of WEBMAT is vastly different from bringing him in as a specialist consultant—especially when we already have two enchanters on the team.
Put yourself in Hugo's shoes. You're currently one of the most skilled enchanters in the eight collages. You regularly give classes to wizards of all eight colours. You have a commissions list a mile long.
A wizard you worked with once a few years ago comes up, and offers you a job at a recently founded branch collage. You've never heard of it before. It's charter is combing arcane and divine magic, and they are currently working with the scary wood elves that have two provinces at each others throat.
Do you take the job?
Look, please explain to me what benefit Hugo will bring to us, and what benefit we can give him. Don't say something vague like "he's a great enchanter" or "we have access to rare research". Give me something specific. For Ranald's sake, we're a great enchanter. So's Egrimm. What can he do that we can't?
If Hugo joins, what tasks will he be doing? How will we compensate him for his time and expertise? Why does he need to be a staff member of WEBMAT instead of just commissioning him via collage favour?
Max and Johann were easy to recruit because they have nothing better to do and they like us. We only got Egrimm because Mira felt he was politically inconvenient and sent him far away. Hugo is not going to be that simple at all.
Ok so my name is Hugo Bann, I work at the colleges making staffs and enchanting items, the vast majority of my work is very samey. A Lady Magister comes up to me I remember her from a previous project. I had to travel all the way to Karak Eight Peaks but It did offer the opportunity to utilise Aqshy differently to how I normally do. She offers me the opportunity to join her branch college and work with her on developing a brand new type of multi wind enchanting. If I accept I get to do something completely new and expand my craft, if successful it'll mean I become famous (among the colleges) as one of the pioneers of this groundbreaking technique, Also probably pretty rich as I'll be one of the few people initially capable of producing these new items. I turn her down because uh... you don't get to be magister by being willing to take minor risks for great rewards?
As for what he would be doing windherding, windherding, windherding. There is plenty there to keep him busy. Like just off the top of my head:
1. Windherd a simple item to get a feel for what it can do. (e.g. Mutable visage/Crown of Fire)
2. Something that has a more complex/direct interaction between the two spells (E.g. Cloud of confusion carrying Consuming Wrath.)
3. Depending on the results of the above maybe a third to clarify limits further.
3. Initial Paper Time!
4. Windherding 2 Aqshy/Hysh Boogaloo
5. Ok but what about a threesome?
6. Getting Max up to snuff enchanting wise
7. Can we go to four?
8. Paper two
9. Ok We can windherd enchanted items but what about staffs? Start simple a staff of one wind which is also an enchanted item of another wind.
10. Further staff experiments based on the results of all the above, (More winds/the enchantment interacting more with cast spells)
11. Another Paper.
That's ~5 years worth of stuff for him to do, more if he isn't working on it permanently/also doing waystone stuff less if some stuff gets knocked off the list due to prior experiments showing it is impossible and or us doing multiple things in a turn.
Also it's not like he can't also continue making staffs/enchanted items in K8P. It'll be less convenient sure but it's not like he'd have to give up his current job entirely. Especially with Mathilde semi regularly traveling back and forth between Laurelorn and K8P.
