I only ever played Mage there, and that only in the last year, but I managed to hear a whole bunch of shit while I was there. "I wasn't supposed to be in charge, but..." is one of those things I heard more often than not. Seems that staff turnover was high. Which I guess a game with that many staffers should be unsurprising given who was at the top of the ladder.
But the spheres in general seemed pretty dead while I was there, and no amount of crunchy stuff was going to move them to give-a-fuck status. I'm not sure that this lies on any one person, so much as the atmosphere of the game itself. Geist might have been dead and lacking in cohesion, but I didn't see much activity and cohesion even in highly structured spheres like Mage.