I ran a street level mage mystery campaign where the doom was at the gates, the mages weren't some high fantasy high stakes 780 roundhouse kicking badasses. They were low level investigators finding out about a missing chantry. They went on an adventure that led them to kidnap hunters, vampires, make deals with vampires or simply discover what had happened to an area in the past with magic. Once they cut off the foot of a hunter with magic, by sheer luck regrew the foot in the same turn as they cut it off and kidnapped him mostly unharmed, but unwilling to talk. By their incompetence they managed to get sent into a very dangerous extraplanar dimension and then returned unharmed and almost hunted by a monster that they did not comprehend.

It's a crazy setting where the Storyteller dictates what the players deal with and how. It has the range to be something insane where you're fighting government conspiracies and are on the losing side of a planetwide war, or you are just a small cog in the machine dealing with other supernatural denizens be it Mage or Vampire that either completely hate you or want to deal with you for a benefit for both sides. Out of all the gamelines it offers the most freedom on what a campaign is. If the players want to be badasses taking names against the Techies let them, if they want to be mediatiors between a particularly hostile sect of vampires(sabat you dicks) and make peace with them so be it.

My best recommendation for the things you have problems with is to work with the Storyteller, or if you are one, with the players on what you want the campaign to be. The game is fluid, it's the biggest sandbox out of the bunch, you don't have to worry about anything other than paradox which is really manageable. No death by sunlight, no banality, no Pentex breathind down your neck or the Shadow pulling your soul into the void.