welp, so far the first thing you both say echoes something that I have thought of before
Fate is a system that has a good flexibility and strength rooted in narrative, but mechanical parts of it are often not defined enough, at least on the GM's side, to help you "balance encounters"
this doesn't make it bad, but it is a very particular limitation that less narratively focused systems usually don't have (and they in turn have entirely different limitations)
@BESW that in particular says something about why those relatively intimate games i had worked well: we had a fairly well shared understanding of what decisions mattered and how we wanted things resolved.
i think we covered it way back when, but i think it's a weakness in the amaterasu story that it was largely based on a hybrid of like 4 or 5 different pieces of media, where those medias each had radically different tones, but several of us had only seen half of them (i think)
i'm interested in starting it back up sometime, but now that you mention it, an overhaul wouldn't go amiss - it would be helpful to revisit our goals for the game and the inspirations fuelling it to see what common ground is available.
I don't think it was the only reason it fell apart, but one of the reasons, to me, seems to be that we lost touch with where we were going with the story
we could have that conversation in a dedicated channel on discord
(i think the dedicated channel would be important for keeping the conversation from being dissolved by the other stuff we talk about when we're active)