There are a few mechanical issues with aspected mages, as they were set out in fifth:
- being given a skill group rather than skills. By RAW that skill group can't be broken until the spend karma stage, so if you actually want to be good at your core skill, you need at least priority C in skills, and need to route skill group points your magic group of choice (and that is not really optimal as often you only care about 1-2 of the 3 skills in the group).
- best case starting with 5 magic, so that again your build needs to have a free special attribute point or you need to drop a load of karma, should you want to start at magic 6
- As already mentioned, casters not starting out with any spells
Personally I've played two character that I originally concieved of as aspected, but in both cases I eventually gave up that plan (in one case went with full mage with weak summoning instead of an aspected caster, in the other went with a mystic adept with no spellcasting (but with alchemy) in place of an aspected summoner.
Most irritating side effect of the magical tradition/adept changes was the removal of Shamanic adepts. Unlike aspected magicians, they cast only spells/summoned spirits associated with their totem (ie the totem had bonuses to cast), but had other magic skills as normal, which was actually an interesting RP thing as well as still possessing a modicum of versatility. I think there was a hermetic variety as well that just used one element (I used to have a couple of different illusionist builds, a phoenix adept, and I think the other was a water hermetic adept. This may have been 15 years ago so my memory is hazy.)
Wenlocke, that was brought back in Forbidden Arcana (called "Apprentice")