Not trying to generally wade into the argument, but I think it is possible that the 'ten waystones' is purely Mathilde's personal estimation and this may become substantially contradicted later on in-quest.
We saw this happen with the Chaos Wastes, where Boney posted that there isn't any hard line and to a person from Araby, the Empire seems pretty Chaos-y.
Then we went to the Chaos Wastes and found there very much was a literal line of demarkation for what was 'Wastes' and what was not, with Egrimm even explicitly calling out the 'Wastes are relative' argument.
So I think it's entirely possible that Boney-is-Mathilde-is-wrong, but I think we have too little data to really come to any conclusions yet.
I agree with the point, but it should be noted that unless we're thinking of a different post, Boney mentioned there would be a hard delineation.
I don't think we can get Praag to be exactly as it was before the Great War, but I think we can severely cut down on the corruption.
It's a spectrum. At the poles the line between reality and unreality is completely obliterated and you live or die based on the whims of laughing Gods, whereas at Praag it's higher chance of mutations and the streets bleed at night, but the sun still rises in the east and water still flows downhill. Arabyans (who live much closer to the equator and don't have to deal with things like Beastmen as a matter of course) would probably argue that the Chaos Wastes start at about Altdorf's latitude. Most of the way the Expedition will be travelling is still normal enough that you can raise horses and cattle there you know what you're doing, because otherwise the Kurgan couldn't live there.
There'll come a point where the Wastes will get really Wastey, but that's the final sprint of the Expedition rather than the whole way, and the planned route will minimize time spent in that.
The page I posted that started with a post from Boney saying that incentives and meaningful changes would be helpful to accelerating Waystone proliferation and buy-in from the nobility. People on the page were discussing ways to achieve 'progress' by putting Waystone in visibly magic-infested cities, whereas I was attempting to point out that we have other options to incentivize noble buy-in more effectively, because short term gains (from the bundling I suggested) will still be more visible to said nobles than cleaning up far-away cities when their lands don't have problems as serious as those cities do.
It would also not be us doing it, it would be the teams of wizards (or at least one wizard) actually building/installing the things. No actions spent by us other than initial setup. Mathilda is not going to personally build and install every new Waystone, that would defy the point of making mass-producible designs.
Most nobility can get access to Jade Wizards for a considerably cheaper cost than waystones. Same thing with other wizard-tasks. We would need to wrangle enough wizards to provide those bonuses to all of the people who get waystones. That would take actions to set up. That's actions not spent on, you know,
waystones.
Most of the descriptions of the construction of waystones we have is that the hard tasks are centralized. The enchantments are done in a centralized location and the Rune might be done on-sight. The wizards overseeing the installation of waystones will be important enough to be told the keyphrases to connect waystones. I cannot imagine anyone but a Lord Magister being told the keyphrase and they aren't going to be doing tasks on the side like that. (Edit: On retrospect, I can see it, but the point still stands. It would have to be a magister trusted enough that would be highly ranking in the college. They aren't going to be spending time on the peasants of Hintertupfingen beyond the Waystone itself.)
It should also be noted that the main people
Mathilde will be negotiating with are foreign heads of state or Elector Counts. Wizards doing wizard things that helps out on a local scale are considerably less enticing when wizards doing wizard things that helps out on the local scale is the default setting. If wizards weren't doing helpful wizard things that would be a reason to send them to the pyre.
The places where we're building waystones are places where the improvements will be obvious. Some of those will be more dramatic than others, like in the Forest of Shadows. It won't take long at all for rumors to spread of giant rocks being erected across the continent that reduces the amount of dark magic in the world.
I guess most of my feeling about it is that it just feels weirdly consumerist in a time when capitalism doesn't even exist.
