Really appreciate the feedback, particularly on the event. The overall commonality and frequency of things can be hard to judge, especially when you start throwing in other mods. I'll look at increasing the frequency of the magically gifted trait, In my playthrough I'm at ~4hrs in and only seen 1 pawn with it, and that one was abysmal in every other aspect so basically useless even with the trait. It's supposed to be rare, probably not this rare.
As for the event, in the same playthrough, I've gotten it only once. I tried to complete the event, but since I'm also using the star wars mods, it's guarded by 4 at-at's plus a slew of other speeders etc and I got wiped every time. They were also separated from the village by a mountain range, so there was no avoiding fighting for me. That was fairly early, and I haven't gone back to try again yet. I'll tweak the frequency (down) for this event and probably lower the amount of loot. I like the mayhem, but maybe I'll make all the random reinforcements not so random. I'll look into the defenses.
My fire mage worked fine at first, but recently lost the capacity to cast spells at range. Spells work only at melee range. I don't know if any of my other mods might interfere.
I've never seen the issue with the fire mage (or any mage) losing their range... did he/she go blind?

The game keeps telling me my pawns gain deeper understanding of magic, but it doesn't say what that does.
The "deeper understanding" message just means you leveled up and have a skillpoint to train for that mage, though I suppose there's no reason not to add in something that says that explicitly.
There needs to be better feedback explaining why spells failed, or even that they failed at all.
Yeah, spells will fail if you try to cast them out of range or out of line of sight, and in both cases take your mana to boot. I'll add this one the list of functions that need to be improved.
Magic missile needs a pew pew sound, not a bang bang sound. That's important.
Hah. You might be out of luck though, I'll try to find a generic sound that fits better, but it's probably going to be outside the scope to add custom sounds to the mod.
I would like it if arcane scripts were much cheaper, but only came with a single spell. If gaining a deeper understanding of magic is supposed to be leveling up, then new spells could be gained from that.
Quite a few people have suggested to change to this behavior. This would be a fairly minor adjustment to make happen I think, so certainly in the realm of the possible. However, I'm personally opposed to further restricting access to abilities. With the skill points, the difference between un-skilled abilities and skilled abilities is pretty big (as you eluded to). So when starting with all the skills, it gives players the ability to see what each spell does (without any additional investment) and rank the ones that work best for them. Additionally, it gives players options, which is what the mod is all about. So while you might have invested in blink with your arcane mage, there might be a scenario where you really just need summon, even if it's not nearly as efficient, but because of the situation (like when you forget it's a full moon and now you have a werewolf in your quarry with 5 other hapless pawns and blink does nothing for you).
The counter argument is that it would only a handful of points anyways.
I'm certainly open to discussion, but I'd like to hear the "why" behind the desire to start with no spells, a single spell, etc.
Jecrell does his mods in this fashion, but I find that either I never even get to see what some abilities do, or I always go for the same abilities first since they're overall more effective. He also allows leveling of abilities through general work (ie doing research levels up your jedi?) I fail to see why that would occur, so in this mod you have to use magic (or be overflowing with mana). So which spell would you start with? Would it be random? Would it become a grind to cast fireballs into a mountain so you could level up to get past initial skills?
The priest class is in the design with cure disease/infection, heal scar, heal health, and healing ring (think orbital strike, but good for you!) with resurrect as the master spell. I actually really like the idea of imposing the "incapable of violence" though!
My favorite spell is a tie between Valiant Charge and Blizzard.

Anyways, long post, but thanks for the feedback and ideas. I'll keep working to fix the bugs and make the mod better and this kind of stuff definitely helps move in the right direction.