Look, I understand that for you this is about thematics and would make everything neater and less messy and more aesthetically pleasing.
But azoicennead does have a point about how it comes off as telling other people how to play their game.
Then with all due respect he is playing the wrong game.
You want a game where you can do anything you want? Play a point buy effects based game like GURPS or Hero or Mutants and Masterminds.
The entire game of Exalted is based around telling people how to play their game. It creates a setting for you, builds mechanics to emulate that setting and otherwise goes out of its way, again and again, to point out that the game is designed to play Exalted.
Nothing prevents azoicennead from playing the game any way he wants, but the corebook is not designed to make that easy. If we eliminated the Eclipse charmtheft tech from the game
nothing prevents him from using it. He can use any houserules he wants.
But as game designers who have a singular vision the purpose of the Exalted game line is to tell you how to play the kinds of games Exalted was meant to play, and part of that is removing insanity like the Eclipse anima which causes massive mechanical and thematic bullshit in every form it has ever existed in.
And you have to keep in mind that often games are restricted to one splat even when the player doesn't necessarily like that splat's themes.
Things I can not play if I want to play an Exalted game: A Jedi KNight, a D&D Wizard, Superman, a Lensman, an asari biotic, a Twilight style vampire, an Eclipse Phase transhuman, etc etc.
Exalted isn't a kitchen sink game and is not designed to be kitchen sink compatible. It is not Rifts. It does not want to be Rifts. Or Torg. Or anything else.
When you play Exalted you set yourself to play a very narrow range of character concepts. If your GM is insisting on running an all Solars campaign and you don't want to play a Solar? Well... tough. I wouldn't come into a D&D campaign insisting I get to play a Jedi Knight either. Games have limits.
If you want to work out, between you, some sort of compromise, that's okay. But that isn't something that should be built into the core rules of the game. The game should be designed to play a game of Exalted. The more you expand the focus, the more of a mess the game rules become until they stop working.
(Also, if you want every splat to stay neatly in theme, you should also be tossing out martial arts and sorcery spells.)
Some people have said we should do just that. But considering that we can do all our out-of-splat thematic we need with those two things I don't see why Eclipse is required. At the moment you have to balance three charm clouds. Adding another multiples the work required to balance by a factor of four.
