The current Sage design is lousy because:
1) Rogues get revelations spell and sages don't ... isn't this very dumb ?! I mean can you imagine this?
2) Sages don't play tactically in an interesting way. You just see human sages sit and pump labs a bit and hope to get ahead.
so lets change from:
-30% Abduct Losses (Dumb! This is like giving mystics -30% AW losses)
Sci Effectiveness +30%
Starting Scientists +50% (bonus staff for personas are expressed as +X not as multiple bonus... so why break convention?)
Access to Amnesia (but not revelations? oh god)
to:
+5 Starting Scientists
Scientists graduate in 33% of normal time (so a 72hr graduation period becomes 24hrs)
Maximum scientist cap in each category +3 each (so you can have 33 scientists on alchemy)
Access to Amnesia and Revelations
This is tactically more interesting as it opens up the possibility of being sometimes worth it to re-assign scientists to other fields.
ie- genuine configurability.
Its at least a bit more interesting than the current design.