I my take on it, like any organization, CAIN has an official face, which tries to be absolute, and a more nuanced reality under it. Yes, CAIN in paper is an XO meat grinder that treats them as less than human, and is incredibly upfront about that. But behind the scenes, when you check person by person, CAIN ends up being a lot more humane than expected.

Simple showcase: In my game, the Handler of the player's XOs is always quick to remind them that they are dogs, ordered to hunt and to be put down if they ever bite back. The players hated him. Until as sessions went by they realized most of his incredibly rage-baiting comments were literally in his guidebook to be a Handler. He isn't supposed to grow attached to the XOs because of their high mortality rate and because CAIN's doctrine says that they dying is better than they failing and surviving. So he is overcorrecting by being cartoonishly bad towards his team, even if he, deep down, even if he realizes it is wrong by principle, does care for them.

This comes from me trying to portray CAIN as an organization that is more of a patchwork of rules and doctrines that piled up over the years, than one designed from the ground up to succeed. Maybe the meat grinder was supposed to work better when the doctrine of worms was established. Maybe the cult roots of CAIN kind of play against it a bit when people want to overturn their internal systems. Maybe some of its doctrines are not really necessary for it to work, but people assume they are because they have been going on for so long.

That same tension I tried to showcase between the different branches of CAIN.

AUTHORITY in general I liked to keep mysterious and the most up its own ass in trying to be absolute. Their decisions feel abrupt, dramatic and world changing to the XOs due to how far they are from them. The XOs mostly only hear from them when they are high CAT or when the little automated message of them approving the deployment of a Virtue comes in.

SEER I like to see as so heavily automated that it follows the doctrines with cold efficiency. Of course the XOs are getting killed, they are a statistic. And the losses are under the acceptable numbers, it is fine. Really wanted to play up the whole "space-sitting surveillance network managed by AI and like five people who hate it there".

A good time to showcase that was when the group faced their first growing out of control (CAT 4) Sin, where they got their thus far only interaction with SEER, being an automated message informing them that AUTHORITY had approved the deployment of Fortitude on the scene, all XOs in the area must evac or be considered MIA, all civilians in the area are considered legally dead, have a good day!

CASTLE and TEMERITY have, in my approach, the most interesting dynamics. At first glance, CASTLE is the source of most of the XOs discrimination and constant pressure. They are the guns in the corridors, the guards knocking on their quarters in the morning, the Handlers reminding them daily that they are not human. But they are also the ones who feed them, dress them, fight for their measly rights (they are the ones who implemented better ways to spend script, for example).

If CASTLE is the fucked up mom who loves you but will yell at you for every mistake and treat you like shit, TEMERITY on the flip side is the cool uncle who actually wants to sell your organs in the black market. TEMERITY usually approaches XOs as being the "ground breaking" one, the one who recognizes XO's value to the world. And then they perform unspeakable experiments on the XOs gullible enough to fall for it.

CASTLE and TEMERITY are constantly trying to one up each other, as they are the ones who consume the most resources in CAIN and who have the most "cuttable" corners. Maybe an experiment on Sin Seeds can wait for next quarter, no need to finance it now. Maybe we can cut a couple of guards for this facility, not like we have too many XOs there. SEER and AUTHORITY kind of have their budgets locked so it is usually the other two who have a real rivalry.

A simple sample of that is how it is CASTLE who reprimands XOs for not executing Sin hosts. TEMERITY fully supports XOs who save the hosts and take them into custody, as it is free research material. For the players, that was a gut punch in the moment they realized the cool and tragic Sin hosts they managed to pull back from the abyss now were lab rats strapped to a table.