No, I'm saying that if you are just going to use the power 90%+ for the attack/block/maneuver that evocation can already do, and use it to 'make' relatively normal weapons that you can hand out to your friends (some sort of thaumaturgy at evocation speeds) then the power is fine as just 'sponsored magic'.

So, the parts of the power that you can't do with that power already should be the ones you spend all the time and rules effort on.

Technically, evocation is really a power that allows you to attack, block, or maneuver and interacts with the action economy, certain skills, etc in certain ways.  And what sponsored magic does is to provide a 'story hook' that describe the theme of your attacks, blocks, and maneuvers.

For example, the the 'reality marble' just an excuse to have fight where you can throw huge gouts of fire at each other and not damage the countryside?  May be best implemented as a genre convention of the game, not a specific power.

Or can you do other things with it?
Examples I can think of:
Store stuff in it. even large things, like, say boats, automobiles, or minions and then take them out when you need them.

Act as a barrier to escape, so that once someone is in it, they have to deal with you?

Act as a maneuver generation engine, that doesn't have the stress limitations of evocation (i.e. something like the 'incite effect' power)?

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Now that I think of it, writing up 'magical sponsor' as a power which adds onto magical powers and replaces 'sponsored magic' may help clean up the rules a little bit.  This also allows you have sponsors which are more powerful (and costs points) or sponsors that suck somehow (and give you back points).

This also removes the odd cost difference of sponsored magic when you do or don't already have other magic powers.

Wasn't there some discussion of true shapshifting (skills only) probably being a 3 point power?  This seems to be a better deal, as you can switch out your highest skills, rather than have levels of lower skills that you don't much care about, anyway.

Organized differently:
Mental Conflicts

Mental Initiative
Coercion
tie-breaker goes to? Rhetoric, maybe?

Mental Attacks
Use Amiability to make people like you and want to do things to help you, and to talk people into doing the right thing. This is generally a mental attack or maneuver.

Use Amiability to extract information from people, either by reading their mannerisms or by talking it out of them.

Use Coercion to threaten people, to scare people, and to make people do things or extract information from them through sheer force of personality.

Use Coercion to make people angry. This is generally a mental maneuver or attack.

Use Rhetoric to make people believe what you're saying, whether it's true or not. This can be a mental attack, a maneuver, or a non-conflict action. If you have a large audience, it can also be a reputation attack.

Mental Defenses
Use Amiability to defend against mental attacks and maneuvers intended to extract information from you or make you believe things and reputation attacks and maneuvers intended to make you look like a bad person.

Use Coercion to defend against mental attacks and maneuvers intended to make you do things or extract information from you.

Use Conviction to defend against mental attacks and maneuvers intended to undermine your faith or to make you act against your principles.

Use Discipline to defend against all mental attacks and maneuvers except those intended to make you believe things.

Use Rhetoric to defend against mental attacks and maneuvers intended to make you do something or to extract information from you, and against reputation attacks made through the use of an audience.

Use Discipline to keep your desires and emotions under control.

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First Impressions
Use Amiability to establish a first impression as an honourable, kind, or otherwise good person.

Use Coercion to appear impressive or frightening. This can be used to establish a first impression or to discourage people from giving you any trouble.

Use Rhetoric to establish whatever first impressions you want, including blatantly false ones. If you use this trapping to establish impressions that could be created with another skill, that other skill modifies Rhetoric for the first impression roll.

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So, from the above, it looks like there are 3 general sorts of mental conflicts:

Those that try to extract information from you
Can attack with: Amiability, Coercion, possibly Rhetoric
Can defend with: Amiability, Coercion, Discipline, Rhetoric

Those that try to get you to do things
can attack with: Amiability, Coercion, possibly Rhetoric
can defend with: Coercion, Discipline, Rhetoric, possibly conviction

Those that try to change what you believe
can attack with: Amiability, Coercion, Rhetoric
can defend with: Amiability, Conviction

Further comments:

Can see plenty of situations where 'friendly' and 'unfriendly' forms of social interaction are both ideal.

Something like:
"The hostile gang of lycanthropes approaches you..."
vs
"The state governor is throwing a posh reception, and many of the people you want to talk to will be there..."

The additional trapping of presence would be there to let you use the different skills in inappropriate situations and in other situations, get people to engage socially with you at all.

example of this stunt at work is Frodo's "I will take the ring to Mordor" from the LotR film and the 'to the pain' stunt from Princess Bride.

I'd prefer the chase mechanics to work for any sort of chase, rather than just be vehicle based.  I'm also a bit unhappy that our current ideas for chase mechanics so far are just 'roll drive (or athletics, or whatever the chase skill is) until the chase is resolved'.

Of course, the problem with allowing you to use 'other skills' during the chase means that most people will attempt to apply whatever their best skill happens to be.  The same problem cropped up when discussions were ongoing about how to make a skill challenge system for DnD 4th that actually worked.

How's this look:

Combat skills get changed as follows:
Ranged Combat
The skill of attacking anything not in the same zone as you, with whatever tools come to hand (natural ranged weapons, thrown weapons, firearms, etc).  Also, defending against any attacks that come from a different zone.  You can use this skill to attack or defend against a target in the same zone at (range combat -2).

Close Combat
The skill of attacking anything in the same zone as you, with whatever methods come to hand (fists, swords, claws, firearms, etc).  Also used to defend against attacks that come from the same zone.  You can use this skill to defend against an attack from a different zone at (close combat -2).

The defensive trapping of athletics stays.

So a combat character would have endurance (for stress), and awareness (for initiative), and then take at most two of the other skills (ranged combat, close combat, athletics) or just one of the attack skills and a defensive stunt that removed the -2 penalty.

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Social skills then get changed to:
Presence
Still provides stress.  Also is the skill used to 'justify' starting social combat.  For example, you are at the bottom of a pit, and want to intimidate your captors, that's not really possible.  But if you can make a high DC presence stunt, you can do it anyway.
Basically used to get people who wouldn't want to otherwise listen to you to do so.

Persuasion
The 'friendly' social combat skill.  Can defend against coercion at -2

Coercion
The 'unfriendly' social combat skill. Can defend against Persuasion at -2.

Reserve (may need a better name)
This would be the general social defense skill.  Also gets the 'oppose empathy' parts of deceit.

If planning to make 'social' combat 'mental', could use discipline here instead.

Empathy
Social initiative and perception.

Here's After Sundown which may have chase mechanics worth looking at.

Here's a rough attempt to adapt them to fate:
There are four different 'distances' in a chase:

Caught
Narrow Lead
Wide Lead
Escaped

Chases generally start at 'narrow lead'.

If neither side attempts a maneuver, the distance changes one step by whoever is going faster.

Maneuver types generally depend on the type of chase (athletics, driving, etc)

The chasee declares they are attempting a maneuver of a particular difficulty.  If they fail this maneuver, they have 'wiped out' (crashed, or something similar).  If they succeed at the maneuver, note the amount of 'spin' they got.

The to stay in the chase, the chaser has to succeed at a maneuver of the same difficulty.  If they fail, they crash or suffer a similar mishap.  If they succeed, note amount of 'spin'.

The distance in the chase changes depending on who got the most spin.

If the range is 'caught' the people in the chase are close enough to effect each other directly.

I perfer to keep the mind set that it's the GM's responsibility to come up with scenarios and situations were every character has their time in the spotlight and play to/against the characters strengths/weaknesses.

I really don't like this attitude when talking about game design.  In theory the GM could do it, but it's not really the GM's main job.  The designer should be trying to make the rules set as easy for the GM (and other players) to use as possible, so that the GM can concentrate on other things.

It's just like arguing refresh points costs.  Sure the GM could try to balance everything, but if the refresh point costs are done correctly in the design, it's not something the GM has to worry about.

In addition, we should assume that every GM has ultimate system mastery, able to make good rulings every time something comes up.  Most people don't have good system mastery

Now, things I'd think about changing.
I don't like exactly how the social skills are split up.  I'm not sure what having high levels of deceit is actually good for, since almost all of your actual social skills are covered by rapport.  Next, there's no explicit skill to provoke people.  As often as Harry does this deliberately, you'd think there'd be a skill trapping for it.  Adding a 'provocation' skill trapping to intimidate might help, but even then, intimidate seems to be a rather limited skill when compared to rapport.

Part of the reason the driving skill gets no use is that there aren't any chase mechanics. Are there any good chase mechanics for other games that might be stolen?  Or does anyone want to take a crack at coming up with some?

An additional problem is that car chases work fine when you only have one or two protagonists, but tend to get odd when you have 4 or more.  One guys makes a character who's good at driving, and he expects to get into cool car chases.  What he really gets to do is drive the minivan that the rest of the team rides around it.  And if there is a car chase, the car character has the embarrasment of driving a minivan for his part of it.  Or even worse, the wizard in the back of the minivan waves his staff around and all the cars chasing the minivan suddenly explode.  All that's left for the car character to do is drive the minivan back to base, carefully obeying the speed limit the whole way.

Another problem is the linking of athletics to defense.  This means that almost all combat characters can move around like jet fighters if they feel like it.  A gun generally has a range of two zones, a combat character can move somewhere between 4-8 zones per round, if they want to sprint.  This means that any fight that someone wants to run away from will quickly leave everyone who isn't the road runner behind.  That social character who wanted to help by doing some maneuvers?  Now that the fight is finally over, you'd better call him and tell him where you finally ended up, so he can get a cab here.  If you had to wait for him to run all that distance, like you'd just done, you'd be here all day.