Templates are just a guideline.

Shapeshifting faeries are totally canon.   Dresden got shot by a Sidhe warrior who turned from a bird into an archer, back into a bird before he fell, just to pick one example.

I keep wanting to do it the other way around.   Something like have a Pixie who mastered "human form" ectoplasmic body so he could get a job making pizza, or a faerie dolphin who could change to human form with hands and legs so he could drive sports cars, or maybe a house-sized troll who got a human form to take up surfing.

A big explosion and a typical surface-street vehicle accident are both about 5 shifts.

Harry often compares his force effects to being hit by a car, so it's worse than being hit by a gun, but from a story standpoint and DFRPG mechanics in the 5-7 shifts range likely, with 7ish being a high speed collision into a wall and maybe 9 for being hit from both sides by two cars each going 60mph and dropping all of their energy into you, or having something the size of a semi pin you to a tree while going at highway speeds

and yeah, the falling rules are just dumb.   Just estimate lethality similar to how other shifts go based on how high up the dude falling is and what he's falling onto.  Remember that we're doing adventure novel physics here, and that stress shifts represent dramatic chances of being removed from the story, not kilometers per second squared type momentum.

We don't really understand much about vampire magic because we only have Mr-Unreliable-Narrator Harry to go on, plus whatever he remembered to ask Bob about on camera.

For example, he figured you needed mortal magic to summon outsiders.  Then the Red Court summoned a bunch of them, but only in the Never Never.  So his current theory is "ok, formerly mortal critters can summon outsiders in the never never".  Which may or may not be true.

What we do know is it FEELS the same to Harry as necromancy, but isn't QUITE the same.   Harry's pretty up on necromancy after the Kemmler stuff, but probably doesn't know the precise differences between what vampires do and what a mortal necromancer does.

Fenris and Bigby from Fables are about equivalent in mojo.   Fenris might even be bigger, more like an archangel, since he's one of the folks slated to break the world in the end.

Yeah, and in Molly's case, it was a death sentence for both herself AND Dresden when she gave into it and invaded Anastasia's mind.  Only Morgan's death prevented that, since he's the kind of guy who would have turned them in once the kerfuffle was over.

Well, start by just optimizing the skill shuffle.

High resources/contacts/social skills in human form, high physical skills in wolf form, he's good at both sides of being a werewolf.

Give him a few more skill points to play with than is typical for your refresh level, or simulate the extra experience with stunts that improve skills or swap trappings so he's solidly good at whatever you want him to be, and unusually expert at his specialties.

add the usual inhuman speed/strength/teeth.  Give supernatural recovery NOT as part of his shapeshift, he can heal himself in human form too, and heal either form incredibly fast.  Don't forget your echoes of the beast and pack instincts stuff.  Maybe give him a pack of wolves to work with in wolf form, and an organization of some kind in human form (mercenaries, criminal organization, corporation, something).  Alternately give him a pack of lesser werewolves to lead, built along similar lines but with fewer skills/refresh.  Pack instincts is really scary with a big pack.  If you want a hybrid human/beast form option consider human guise instead of human form...you get most of the shapeshift powers if you go all furry but don't get skill swap unless you change to a true animal.

I think that's probably enough to pull off a pretty impressive character.   If you really want to go gonzo on the SU powers, some kind of psychic attack (incite emotions or maybe dominate) that lets him exert power over wolves and the "wolf" portion of opposition (easier if a werewolf, but some aspects might let him into other characters) might be possible, but I'd just use social skills myself.

The "min/max" in Fate is mostly choosing good aspects.

Good meaning "they steer the story to the kinds of conflicts, problems and awesomeness I want my character to be".

The skill/stunt framework in Fate Core is a skeleton, the aspects are are everything else.  You need the skeleton, to flag your routine competence and favored approaches to problems.

DFRPG actually blurs the lines a bit because the supernatural powers are so strong that they overwhelm the mechanical advantage of using fate points for +2 or rerolls.  They do not, however, provide a smidgeon of protection against compels, so you sometimes get situations where someone at Mab's level is discommoded by rolling a nail toward her.

They used Spirit of the Century iconics.  I guess they just assumed anyone who signed up was familiar with them and wanted to play one.

I probably could have figured out more to do if that flyboy was my character.  By the last half hour I'd kind of gotten a handle on him, even invoked the high concept at a critical point.  But yeah.   The Codex Alera game I ran had pregens all suited to the situation but I did not really have the hang of aspects yet, so no, I didn't fill in all the invoke/compel details I had in mind, and my players had only one real Fate veteran, the rest were fans of the books but had varying degrees of RPG backgrounds.

So it is entirely possible my attitudes towared convention runs are based on a small sample size of not very well thought out pregens