Yeah. And bbbbboooorrrriiinnnggg.... 
The goal, I believe, wasn't to create a particularly amazing religion, but rather one that seeks to spread everywhere. One can only realistically seek one or the other within the current system, so one has to chose. For a religion with such objectives as Beluaterranism, staying as vanilla as possible would be the best path.
Nothing prevents a vanilla religion from having flavored orders within it, though. Imo, this would be the optimal path to take.
I'd rather say that any room for personal opinions or philosophy is what has created splits.
The biggest religions in the real world are monotheistic and have an answer for nearly any philosophical question.
But i agree on the saints, that there shouldn't be a list with the 'real' saints.
It would perhaps be more fun and logical to have different saints in different parts of beluaterra and the freedom for people to worship there own saints.
In the real world. Not in BM. BM favors bland religions with little content. I've fought for a long time and proposed a bunch of ideas that would help religions with actual content to compete with the edge being vanilla grants, but there was not enough interest in helping making fun religions successful. Which is why, as I said above, one must seek either being well-developed, or being successful.
I always hated when religions tried to do that. "You can worship anyone you want, any way that you want, so long as you sign up on our membership list."
IMHO, those are the kinds of "religions" (and I use that word very loosely) that kill the religion game in BattleMaster.
What kills the religion game is how religions are implemented. People just adapt to best use what's available. I've written murals of text to propose changes that would help improve the religion game. People are happy with religions doing fine as hollow shells. Don't blame others if they opt for hollow shells if doing otherwise is just shooting oneself in the foot.
