I really hated Jalim's assassin in Empire but couldn't justify actually doing anything to him until he started mouthing off to me when we were equal rank.

Despite his cabal retrieval, I demoted him for mouthing off to me. Which is, since it's the High Priest, who interprets Imperial Law just below the Emperor, tantamount to breaking the Law itself.

I basically eviscerated any chance he had of getting Shadow Lord because the imms were already sick of his ultra-conservative playstyle and then pretended to do it because of a breach of conduct. Really, I just wanted him to shut up. His character never went anywhere after that.

Without commenting for or against Jalim in that particular instance, demotion did exactly what I intended to do. If I anathema'd him, he'd have instantly become much MUCH more lethal than he was, and probably gone right back to behaving like Jil or Iltch, and gotten far more imm attention and stuck around longer to piss with the rest of the Empire. Instead, I ICly humiliated him.

There is an automatic anathema-level drawback. It's called not logging in in forever. You become a bloodoath for that and get anathema'd forever.

In the Fortress, you get Humberts, who go for long stretches not logging in at all. In Empire, you have to play a minimum of a certain amount of hours a week or you lose your shiny Emperor spot. Elhe's never going to be Emperor again. No one is insane enough to screw up and get him appointed to that position.

No Imm rewards goodies just because they adhere to those drawbacks. They reward them in spite of those drawbacks. They reward them on issues almost entirely unrelated to those drawbacks and had the characters in question been neutral or evil they would have gotten the same rewards, varying situations not withstanding.

Also Anathema does indeed give a betrayer vuln, else Imperial Vengeance wouldn't hurt them as much as it does.