I think I actually agree with most of your points when it comes to religion. I also like the idea of fewer religions than nations because as you said it makes the religion game different from the nation game...
As for how the diplomacy stuff messed with the war in the south...yeah...that federation stuff was a bugger to work against, and Strombran was much better than we were at figuring out ways to stiff it to the other guy...
And I was better at ordering that Tara respect each individual little bit of the federation we could and just WAIT for Strombran to pull something tricky....and when they did I was really good at protesting the dishonesty of such disloyal tactics and such...and then unleashing my general to do the same thing right back... hehehe
Ah...the Elder Channel in the League of the Eagle was a warzone...from a player perspective it was awesome...
On Daishi and such? Absolutely. The more the merrier. Yao Ling runs the religion as...nonaggressively as possible. Priests are banned from raising the people up against secular rulers...since it is of course the mission of Daishi to protect the common people from the Destroyers of mankind, the monsters, the undead, and the daimons.
When it comes to the beliefs and tenants of Daishi...well...the really basic one is that there are gods fighting a war against enemies that would break our sanity if we saw them. The monsters, undead, and daimons are lesser servants of their enemies that sometimes slip through the battle lines and we must defeat them. If we cannot, the gods may have to step in and their weapons are powerful beyond imagination. Yao Ling teaches that the loss of the lands under the Blight was the gods doing. They saw that we could not defeat the daimon blight and chose to remove it from the earth to give us a chance to survive. She doubts they will be able to do that again if we should fail once more. And anyone who dies in service to Daishi will go on to the next realm where the gods battle and be given the honor to fight at their sides in the greater war beyond our own.
As for individual thoughts on Daishi and such? The gods reveal themselves to everybody in different ways. There has never been a case of any member of Daishi being kicked out or even threatened with the charge of apostasy. There are no tenants that everyone must believe, no chants that must be done verbatim to prove you are a true believer or anything like that. The only requirement is that you stand against the undead, monsters, and daimons when they come. Anything else can be worked with.
