Mara, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that charisma will not equate to compassion; a vengeance cult/cult of personality (like those started by the 20th century leaders you mention) will be an equally viable option.
The bad news is that charisma’s real benefits come at scale - mass movements, of a religious or quasi-religious nature - so being a charisma-maxed character will likely involve engaging with the unwashed helot masses as a path to victory. You don’t have to like them, but you’ll have to fake it well enough to inspire their fervent belief.
If you forgo that path and just play charisma for its effect on small groups, like the noble elite or guild masters, you’ll need to rely much more heavily on your team, with deputies who can win the war for you. And woe betide you if the wrong one betrays you.
idnlun, there’s no necessary connection between the Shayardene heresy and royalism. That said, of course it’s not all peaches and cream, either. No religious or ethical system of values survives the encounter with reality unscathed, as witness the example of our world’s compassion-creeds (secular and otherwise).
You’re right that the Laconniers are likely to oppose your particular vision for the realm.
The tradeoff between fragmentation and participation is not going to entirely go away, I’m afraid; it took a lot more experiments in democracy than the gameworld has had before we Earthlings figured out how to make a republic work at scale. Even geniuses are limited in how much political innovation they can create from scratch.
Even today, with all our knowledge and experience, building a strong state in a post-conflict environment is hard to combine with making it participatory. (I’ll be flying out of Kabul in 12 hours, inshallah; my years in Afghanistan are a significant influence on Choice of Rebels).
But your points are well taken. Moots were the local equivalent of things, btw, and didn’t just involve elites. You definitely won’t be required to leave former helots out in the cold. And thanks for the pronounspotting.