There are several important things to remember when judging how things turned out with the Privateers. First, people didn't understand that they could have scanned the entire group for mages as one vote, nor that Taylor could make a Template without having somebody to make Devices for her. A 5% chance to scan one person and find they had potential, when weighed against whatever else was going on at the time. Further, people misunderstood that they had to deliberately choose a write-in to interact with a group that told them they would work with them on upcoming raids. Miscommunication has cost us a number of times.
Another is that the Privateers as they wound up became that way because of the choices made by the players. Different choices would have led to a radically different group at the end of things, all because the choices the players made at the time would have been made real by the QM.
Both TG and IE would have needed lots of support to turn themselves into effective powers, so picking either of those would have made the Privateers vastly more important. That the players at the time didn't pick the options that required that assist meant a resource was less valuable than they could have been. If we had scanned them back in BB, and gotten the first TG back then, we'd have had a lot of time to build up a tech pool that could outfit the group far beyond what any non-tinkers would be able to have. Making more Templates would have meant a much larger force of Mages, which again would have meant a vast difference when measured against what we wound up getting.
Sometimes, people get too caught up in the way things happened, and look back, not seeing how things could have gone differently. Others overestimate how much of a change minor choices could have made. Things are the way they are. If they weren't, they'd be different.*
*My own version for the medium anthropic principle.
I am not sure how much I like the "QM could have made it happen" argument - I mean, certainly, the QM can make literally anything happen, no matter how implausible, but I was more looking at it from the storytelling perspective and how much sense something made in that context. And from that side of things, Privateers turning out as a valuable asset doesn't seem very realistic.
Certainly, Taylor
could have scanned the whole group and gotten more mages out of it - but I consider this an
undesirable course of action, because as a group the Privateers were never a group aligned with Taylor's principles and morals. She joined because her dad asked her to, not because of the group itself. They were Danny's pet project, not Taylor's, and as we found out he was the only thing keeping them from going off reservation.
One can only imagine how much worse things could have turned out if the few mages Privateers got turned out to belong to the radical faction - chances are we would have needed to put them down ourselves, and the havoc they could have wrought would have tarnished Taylor's reputation something fierce.
And no, I don't believe Taylor could have kept that from happening once Danny went away (realistically given what we had to work with, outside of QM arm-twisting to the point of brainwashing) regardless of player choices. Taylor has nothing in common with these people as a whole, her concerns and dreams aren't their concerns and dreams and her age means by and large she would have been treated about as seriously as Missy gets treated by the Protectorate.
And neither Taylor - nor the Players - have any real motivation to try and forcibly shape this group of strangers into something not too objectionable.
We (neither Taylor nor players) don't get anything out of it.
If we want magical allies, then what Taylor is doing now is the vastly superior choice - empowering
specific individuals that she can count among her actual friends and allies, not random members of a group she has nothing in common with aside from them being her estranged dad's disgruntled coworkers.
And even that besides, Taylor's interests and goals don't include being a part of a gang or holding territory, so the Privateers are entirely pointless for her anyway, even in the unlikely scenario where they can be wrangled into something decent. They have no use besides some small-time fights with other gangs, which is so far below Taylor's playing field that the world would actively be a worse place if time was being wasted on the Privateers - a bunch of people who have neither the training nor the mindset to actually make the world better.
We are empowering entire Protectorate teams (Guardian beasts) that will finally allow the law enforcement to stop being outnumbered by the villains and really start cleaning the gangs up. We are as thick as thieves with Dragon; we are learning Cauldron's secrets and collaborating with Legend and Alexandria, who see us as the Triumvirate's successor. We are being instrumental in Endbringer fights. We have the
Simurgh at our disposal. We are the point of contact between Earth and an Alien civilization which just might be the salvation of us all.
That's the level we are playing on. Our actions are literally shaping the future of the whole world and making it better on a societal scale. That's why, as has been noted in the narrative, Taylor doesn't have to care overmuch about the opinion of someone like Chevalier - because she works on a level where the opinions of a single Protectorate head don't matter.
The Privatters have no place on that stage. Where we have to tread, is not a path they can walk. And if we had tried to forcibly drag them along, they could realistically never be more than a chain around our neck, holding us back.
The world would literally be a worse place for Taylor having tried just that, on account of all the time that would have been wasted on them - a remnant of Brockton Bay who are interested in only their little corner and waging an ill-thoutht-out war against the nearest petty drug dealers - as opposed to any of the other world altering tasks and allies we are dealing with.
Thankfully Taylor (nor the players at large) never had a reason to care overmuch about the Privateers, so it's a good thing we never tried to force her to try and fit this round peg in a square hole. Cruel as it is, I almost want to say it's a good thing that Danny was knocked out of action. Because with him out of the Picture, Taylor truly had no reason to try and integrate herself with a group that offered nothing to her and with which she has nothing in common with.
