If find it funny that in almost all Madoka fanfics every Magical Girl runs their battery 30 seconds from Witchdom at all times.
I can only assume that the Incubators are draining their energy dry at all times and don't care that the Magical Girls are constantly starving and always only one bad day from collapse.
it's literally a system where the only way to get more Grief cleansing is pick one:
- Another girl Witches out, and then you kill the Witch.
- A familiar rampages enough (kills some multiple people, unclear exact count) to become a Witch and you harvest that.
Like, I don't know if later materials contradict this, but per the anime that's all the options we're given.
The Incubators don't need to do shit beyond have this system in place in the first place. Kyoko and Mami are both explicitly unusual just for being veterans at all, Mami more so for doing so in any kind of moral way- Kyoko explicitly tries to make Sayaka the new MG farm familiars for a reliable supply, and the fact that Kyoko has an actual
supply of Grief Seeds at all is apparently not just a given, which is not exactly surprising.
MGs build up Grief by being emotionally distressed, using their magic, or taking damage they have to heal- of course, these are all things you
expect when fighting Witches.
The system is basically built on every level to make being a Magical Girl likely to lead to a swift and gruesome end, and the story is very much aware of that fact. It's literally a given to the system that either
most Magical Girls Witch out (or die!) early, or else that
most Magical Girls do essentially what Kyoko does which, what do you know, is bad for one's mental and emotional health, making it hard to not wind up Witching out for that reason.
Meanwhile, we see that One Bad Day is enough to
massively fill up one's Soul Gem, so basically the only way to not be One Bad Day from Witching Out is to be both really callous to human suffering (which the lifestyle will subject you to a great deal of) and
also a super badass ala Mami or Kyoko (but preferably moreso) so you can not only callously grind Grief Seeds that you
know are being caused by mass human deaths, but do so at a minimum of risk and effort to allow yourself to do so without burning much energy in the process.
It would be
surprising for most Magical Girls- who are young girls, late teens at the most when Kyubey gets them to contract by, bluntly, lying to them and hiding how awful the lifestyle of child soldier will be, and do not likely have the life experience to have developed effective coping skills before the magic parts of Grief- to be able to reliably avoid being one bad day off, while the mechanics of Grief are obfuscated from them, the rules of the system are rigged to lead to more veteran Magical Girls tending to view you as competition if they've made it that far, a position that Kyubey does nothing to fight against, and while Kyubey, the magically enforced secrecy, and the general culture we see all but forbids actually consulting with adults not in on things to get, like, good management skills from their parents or whatever who have no idea what is going on.
The system is rigged on every level, and frankly fanfic tends to give the magical girls protagonist privilege whereby they're the lucky ones who don't, as canon implies happens to some girls, Witch Out literally just from the emotional stress of realizing they could have wished for something
better, right after making that Wish before even going into the super stressful child soldier parts.
It's not clear exactly how much Grief a single Seed can siphon off, mind, but it is explicit in canon that the veterans expect you to need to hunt up more every few
days, not months or years apart, so combine that with everything else, and yeah. Yeah, they're one bad day off because the system is just plain rigged to make the vast majority if not every single MG one bad day off.
