@Aaron Peori's "Areas of Malfeas will go centuries without a truly cataclysmic event like two layers smashing together, which basically kills everything on the facing sides that can't cross over to the other side of their level fast enough"
in no way contradicts my point that "Malfeas is a prison society with omnipresent violence, a rule of law which means more powerful people can fuck over anyone else at their whim with no recourse, and there simply does not exist the social stability or other such things that modern society relies on".
Oh hi the "prison society" excuse comes up again. And again. And again.
- If Malfeas is big then it is probably not homogeneous, it is probably incredibly diverse. The larger Malfeas is, the more powerful you have to make the forces that compel it to uniformity (in whatever aspect). And the more powerful you make those force, the more contrived your world becomes, and the more we have to wonder how the Exalted beat it, and the more we have to wonder what's the point of having a huge Malfeas if you need to contrive a bunch of other things to make it fit into the aesthetic you want.
- Actual prisons have economies. Gangs have rules that might as well be laws; they even do things like pay pensions to widows.
You are continuing to try to walk this contradictory line where there is so much horrible stuff happening constantly everywhere thatit is impossible for any kind of society to survive and grow and accumulate wealth, and:
"The same is true of Malfeas. You can go
millennia without ever once experiencing a layer smashing into another of Adorjan showing up or whatever. Octavian has ruled his quarter layer for centuries at the least with hints his empire stretches back to the High First Age. Nothing says
any individual demon is in dire need of saving right now."
If Malfeas is so uniformly terrible that none of the things I've described can happen - to the point that a reasonably liquid market in a commodity you
explicitly analogized to oil isn't even possible such that Keris has to acquire it directly from favor-trading or produce it herself - then plenty of ordinary people are perfectly justified in saying "man, this really ruins the game for me". Plenty of ordinary people are perfectly justified in saying that this makes them feel Creation is meaningless.
Unless you just don't make Malfeas incomprehensibly huge. If you don't do that, you can actually justify your presentation without making Creation seem meaningless, because you don't have to fight so hard against the law of large numbers.
And that's even we get started on your "This problem persists even if you throw out hearthstones-as-oil, because they're going to produce something - you're going to get a thousand industrial revolutions, a thousand advanced (by Exalted's standards) societies that put the Realm to shame. " - which is, and remains nonsense. The Realm is built on stability and social harmony, which enables the kleptocracy of the Dragonblooded. It is reliant on to give just one example, any two commoners not murdering each other because one of them has a cow that the other wants.
By contrast, Malfean law is based on the principle that the cow is yours if you can take it from the other person.
And that's before we get into how demons are not mentally human, and pretending a demon is mentally human is a way for a summoner to fuck up. Blood apes live to battle, kill, and consume the blood of their enemies. Give your average blood ape a choice between a fortune, and killing the person offering the fortune and drinking their blood, and they'll pick the latter. They are far from unique there. First Circle demons have alien drives that, if we look at Games of Divinity as a representative cross section of demonkind, do not synergies well with what you believe is a natural conclusion - namely, let's re-emphasise this, "a thousand industrial revolutions, a thousand advanced (by Exalted's standards) societies that put the Realm to shame".
"Alien drives" do not give you a blank check to wave your hands and say things behave any way you please.
"Alien drives" make trade more likely, not less. Alien drives mean that the potential gains from trade - you want X, I want Y, X and Y are totally different - much larger. They make the gains larger in reverse fashion too - you hate doing X job, I hate doing Y job, so I'll do X for you and you'll do Y for me".
Your blood ape may not care about "a fortune", but he can be bribed with killing and drinking the blood of
five people instead of me. Or if his time horizon is so short that he can't be, then the blood apes with longer time horizons will figure out ways to beat him. At some point you're going to filter the blood apes down and down until you get dominance by a group with some ability to wait, and then they'll set up an empire of killing-and-drinking-blood. And then they'll run into conflict with the empire of some demon that just really likes making buildings, so that empire will make buildings for some other empire, use them to buy slaves, and give the slaves to the blood ape empire as tribute to be sacrificed. And so on.
And yes at every step of the way these deals could collapse, but the groups that make these deals are going to be more powerful than the ones that don't; the societies that manage longer time horizons will eventually surpass the ones with shorter; and in the end you will get a result that is not at all
nice but that has order and large-scale social structures.
Unless you just don't make Malfeas incomprehensibly huge.
