I will say that Demons the Possessed was imbalanced as all-get-out. Basically unfinished. It was still fun to play, but we basically had infinite willpower (due to a dot of Pride each) and once I maximized Sloth, I was using Intelligence for every roll. We were fighting angels and the military, and winning, until the ST got bored and hit us with a RPG. Was a fun ride though!
IME I kinda hate the sheer amount of plot I had to dump on the players before we could really even do character gen. All the different factions and how they hate each other but particularly this faction, all the different ways you coulda became special and what that means, what the moral meter is and what that means, yadda yadda yadda.
Granted, it was genius the transgression, but I don't see how its much better with the actual powers.
Our solution for Vampire was that the city was ruled by Invictus, so we mainly worked for/with them. A few sessions later we were sent to work with quasi-allies the Lancea Sanctum. Carthians were played for a joke, occasionally showing up at Elysium parties acting like that one guy who's evangelical about Bitcoin. We eventually learned more about them, but only after several months (they just weren't powerful in the city).
Circle of the Crone never even came up in our time playing, and we met exactly one Ordo Dracul member (technically early on, but he only revealed his allegiance towards the end of our campaign).
Notable: WoD loves specifying things too much, and ends up with hilarious results like "vampires are 1/100,000 people" because half of the types of vampires aren't allowed to take powers that let them feed secretly, so they're just kidnapper/murderers, combined with "there are 13 types of vampires, each type has factions, and some of those have subfactions with a dozen ranks with multiple vampires in them per town." Which is fine, as long as your city has (quick calculation) at least 150 million people, give or take.
Heh, yeah there's some of that. But not every weird bloodline or faction has to exist in every city. It wouldn't make sense logically, but it'd also be a ridiculous narrative to try to fit them all in at once. I don't think Seattle has many Brujah, now that they're a Mexican biker gang. And a landlocked city probably doesn't have that bloodline based around drowning. (Or maybe it does, because vampires are sneaky that way! Depends on the story.)