Actually, 1) no, in Exalted, if you can establish a sufficiently isolated location you can make that prediction that well. Given that Creation is afloat in a giant sea of chaos which has a size and many other traits of basically 'what the fuck is this answer,' making a sufficiently isolated location is hard.
2) No predictive system has ever managed to properly compensate for essence use in general, although mortals especially have only rarely broken out of a prediction.
3) Due to a weird matter of metaphysical heritage humanity descends from Raksha.
Weren't you the one who said that without souls, a sufficiently fine calculator is all it takes for the ability to make precise predictions, unless the predicted system includes soul(s)?
'This setting is animist' and 'all things have an essential nature' are not contradicting statements.
'Is animist' describes the mechanisms by which phenomena work. If animism 'shows up' at, say, the cellular scale, that means that molecular-scale phenomena don't even behave like they do in our world. If animism 'shows up' at a larger scale (e.g. there is a spirit of a mountain, as is proper for Exalted), then it means that even smaller-than-mountain phenomena don't behave like they do in our world.
As far as I currently understand, Exalted is animist on many levels, up to and including mountain-scale.
Look at it this way. Something is made and presented (1E). This has its ups and downs, but, overall, it works. I might bitch about triremes or the omnipresent Guild (both casualties of the map expansion), but these aren't dealbreakers, I can simply modify those in-play when I run because changing these things to make sense does not touch any load-bearing pillars.
A new boss takes over and starts cranking out retreads of the original thing, except badly done: little to no cool new stuff, they manage to leave out actual cool stuff from the original set, the rules flat don't work (Dragon-Blooded, Sidereals, Monk, Fair Folk...) and what new stuff does exist vacillates between boring and terribly unfitting, which you can identify because you already have all of the fluff they're busy reprinting and amending (badly).
So yes, 1E and 2E are basically the same setting, in that 2E's setting is largely the same as 1E's setting, plus dumbshit bits and bad mechanics. This is not mutually exclusive with rejecting most of 2E's books for being shit. You simply, in that case, revert to 1E's fluff - minus the dumbshit bits. It's entirely reasonable to go "I like Exalted" and "Exalted 2 is shit".
I think what you just described sounds closer to "I like a small subset of Exalted, which mostly happens to be a (non-identified size) subset of Exalted 1e". The latter part of the set's definition is important: it seems like while people tend to blame things they dislike on 2e, there's a long list of disliked things dating back to 1e.
I'm extra puzzled (despite previously receiving a reply on the topic from Aleph) about Kerisgame and its participants (their stance against 2e), because judging by your exchange with Omicron, Infernals in Kerisgame are
not a 1e 'invention', they're a moderate rework of the Infernals found in 2e/MoEP:Infernals/Broken Crane/Ink Monkeys/etc. (with a heavy rework of game mechanics, I presume).
Both of these look like counterintuitive, contradictory, cherrypicky stances. Kinda like buying a pizza for the cheese and then being unhappy about everything else included in the recipe, then proceeding to dissect the pizza (removing and possibly also adding ingredients) and reheat in in the microwave over, yet never
just buying cheese and cooking it with whatever one likes. At least that's how it looks to me as someone who jumped into the setting first and the community holding such a stance second.
