Setting elements are not rules, and nobody except you is talking about them here.

Untrue. I was also treating the fiction as rules until Viatos made a very good point.

I still prefer to treat the setting and background elements as laid out in "Your Story" as part of the RAW, and I use the descriptions and plot elements as context to inform the mechanics and the more rule-like rules.

Anecdotal offering:

My players rip out 12- to 17-shift rituals almost every game, but they have THREE Wizards so that's not a huge challenge.

In the game I play in, I can generally get a handful of 3-6 Declarations out of the other players to support one of my character's rituals, which means he can reliably run rituals in the high teens. Casting the ritual is, of course, a blast.

But you can make that argument by citing the rulebook.  Specifically, some of the places where it says that the game is set in the DV.

Name of the Game: Dresden Files RPG
Cover:Whether you’re a champion of God, changeling, vampire, werewolf, wizard, or plain “vanilla” mortal human being, this volume of The Dresden Files RPG gives you all the rules you need to build characters and tell your own stories in the Dresdenverse. Inside, you’ll uncover the secrets of spellcasting, the extents of mortal and supernatural power, and the hidden occult reality of the unfamiliar city you call home.
Together with Volume Two: Our World, The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story gives you everything you need to make your own adventures in the thrilling and dangerous world of New York Times best-selling author Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series!
Pg 8: I Want to Learn…
…about the Dresdenverse: see Chapter 1 and maybe Chapter 12 in Your Story and, well, all of Our World.
Pg 10: the heading of Harry's World, then the Maxims of the Dresdenverse, and basically the entire chapter.

I could go on, but if can you look at those references and "We aren't playing in the DV" then what's the point of me pasting more and more lines of text?

When it is put this way, then I have to disagree: as I mentioned in the other thread, it would be a bad precedent to establish that playing DFRPG requires reading the entire series. Reading the series is a great source of inspiration, but also creative constraint, and it wouldn't really be fair to expect everyone to tack it into the price of admission for this game.

I'm happy to base game advice on my knowledge of the fictional setting, and I'm going to cleave to the canon for any decisions I make for my own game, and firmly so, but when put upon this footing, I just can't co-sign a stance that obligates players to know the entire book series in order to have fun.

I presume that what we're doing is:
1. converting Refresh into Build Points at a rate of 1:10
2. converting Power costs into Build Points and adjusting some of the costs
3. adding additional Power modifiers
4. spending Build Points on all these things
5. take the leftover Build Points and convert them back at a rate of 10:1, rounding up

I had a couple of new folks join after campaign creation. We went through their guest star phases, creating three new stories that involved different members of the existing group, taking place as short stories between the other cases they had worked. We did not retroactively insert the new guys into the original gangs' stories. So the new stories focused more on the new guys, but that was alright.

Darn, I just went to the end of the section and stopped.  Sorry, you're right.

Not as bad as me missing an entire OGL page ::blush::

Take the flying lightning shooting item of power, if your gm's ok with it then it is fine by the rules.

THAT is an actually viable solution, but it sidesteps the whole point of that debate.

Amusingly, there are no actual rules for acquiring templates. (IIRC.) So by the RAW, Harry arguably can't become the Winter Knight.

YS 72: "It may be possible to combine some of these templates, if you can afford each template’s musts. However, it will be rare that those costs work out. We haven’t seen a Wizard-Lycanthrope-Red-Court-Infected-Changelingpotamus in Harry’s casefiles, and you certainly won’t see one as a playable character in this game. For good reason—bring that much mashed-up mojo to bear in one character and you’re on a fast train to negative refreshville."

On White Court Virgins:
YS 85 indicates that Emotional Vampire and Incite Emotion are Musts for a White Court Virgin.

Also, "Unblooded White Court virgins do not have the weaknesses of full White Court vampires, making them difficult to detect. Some vestiges of ability—enough to excite emotion and feed on it—exist prior to that point, and a White Court virgin fully aware of his condition might be able to finesse making use of it in a mostly “safe” way."

So a White Court Virgin must have these powers to be a White Court Virgin in the game. The rules don't indicate how old the character has to be to have manifested this, but it is clear that these powers are Musts.