As a playtester of Arlaten the Magus, I have to disagree. Ignorant and bigoted is how the scenario describes the Sartarite POV. (They're also dirty and violent, but that's beside the point.) Dumb, it's not. From their POV, they're wise to forgo any short-term advantage which might come from accepting sorcery spells, because the long-term effect will be to destroy their souls. This, it seems to me, both adds color to the setting and frustrates minimaxing players, two admirable goals.
While I'm on the subject of frustrating minimaxers, I'd like to mention an assumption Mike Dawson and I make in our games. If you cast a spell at a person using his or her own MP's, you automatically succeed. (This is an extreme example of the benefit of having some part of the victim when you cast the spell at him or her.) Thus, hardly anyone will share storage crystals or MP matrixes. Maybe you'll share one with your father or mother, but who else can you trust that much? Not your brother or sister, in many cases. The analogy we came up with was this: asking to borrow someone's MP storage device is like asking "Can I borrow a pint of blood? I'll give it right back."
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