Listen to the Rain

I think it depends on the feel you're going for? I'm only familiar with C:tL out of these systems, which gives me a strong bias towards that.

With either C:tL or Mage, I'm wondering if you could like... divorce paths from effects? Like, if you want people to theme it better, you could just like... say that it takes some amount of XP to buy an n-dot contract/spell? And then people could just pick and choose. Maybe with a thing like, "You need at least one spell of the previous dot level before you buy up a new one" or something, so that people didn't just load up on 5-dot effects? Then you could get the ease of "There's a spell list" along with the thematic flexibility you seem to like about the Warhammer system, but you've also for the relative ease of conversion from the WoD games?