Hmm, yeah, thinking more on it, this vote kind of boils down to a "Do you Do the Thing or not Do the Thing?" vote. And historically, Doing the Thing has been more interesting, while not Doing the Thing usually results in the narrative meandering around until it finds some other direction to go in. Which is a bit of a waste of time, which isn't something we have in abundance. So, counterintuitively, to save time I'm inclined to go for the closer relationship.
If problems or complications arise, then we can just... deal with them? That's something we've been missing from the plotline, and sometimes the quest itself, as a whole: actual problems to actually spend our time resolving. We do a lot of prep work, we do a lot of getting confused about what prep work we want to do, but we don't get a lot of execution in relative terms. If problems don't come up, cool, we're ahead. If problems do come up, cool, we have something to do and give the narrative some real texture.
Obviously, problems can come up through the arms length option as well. However, in the past when we've had problems come from things we barely acknowledged, we've had very real trouble even beginning to do anything about those problems. The reason is simple too, we just didn't have the narrative detail on the subject to, well, do anything about it. If we don't, if Ling Qi doesn't, have information about a problem, it tends to take a long time to poke around investigating before kicking off the process of starting to put together an action plan and... viola, by the time we're in place to respond the damage has either mostly passed us by or we have a new crisis(that we're unprepared for) to deal with instead.
I choose the path of information. Because that is almost always the path of action.
[X] Take a close approach, allow him into the decision and planning loop of most of their actions. Keep him close, and maybe, just maybe outright convince him that you're right.