Yep apperantly they are vastly increasing the number of resources in the game.
On one had it feels cheap to have things like "Piety" reduced to a score... at the same time however it does make sense that they would reduce a sort of story perspective thing that would have otherwise been handled by the ST/GM/DM (How the church thinks about you) to a score since... well... how else is the game not only going to keep track of something like that but also tell you at the same time? It is nice that they include these story telling elements even if they have to be reduced to a number rather then a simple statement on a sort of quasi-relationship between large entities.
I'm not sure it feels any more or less cheap to me than reducing Strength or Intelligence or Presence to a score. Not to mention Grog Loyalty. When you have a game with multiple perspective characters, I think it'll be tough to expect players to maintain narrative cohesion across characters. I think you're spot on about needing to quantize something in situations like this.
I still kinda wonder if they will even do justice to the spells in the game with respect to your covenant. A lot of the things that pressured starting covenants were REALLY unimportant later on.
I've definitely noticed a lot of variation, even among Spring covenants, between different sagas. Especially if you look at the stories from the AM forums, there seem to be a lot of players who want a high powered game, so they min-max their mages and the SG accommodates by handing them easy access to lots of vis, nice books, tutors for any mundane skill they might need, etc, etc. When I'm SG, I tend to start the players with no incomes (vis or mundane), but allow them to Midas their way around for several years while they get some infrastructure set up.
Simply create a race of expert dragonfolk (Not sure if 5 actually limits your ability to do this or not) to help you.
In 5th ed, creating things with souls is outside of the ability of magi, as it falls under The Limit (to Magic) of the Divine. Having your resident Verditius create enchanted items that do the tasks that might otherwise fall to grogs is more common... the Covenants sourcebook had a section on craft magic.