Yup,
I have the same range of emotions about Nephilim as you. I got the game and I had so much hope, reread it a dozen times thinking there was just something I missed, some key phrase or concept that would just make the whole mess fall into place. Then I realised that it wasn't me. I ran a couple of campaigns using the themes and settings, even some segments of the magic system were pretty cool. What I wound up doing was using the basic despcriptions of the five (six really) forms of Ka as the components of a Chomski-esque transformational grammar of magic, where each Ka could be either an action or subject or both. A spell or magical effect could be improvised by describing its effect using this syntax. Characters had skill levels in each Ka which would have to succeed in order for the effect to go off. An example might be "Seek Uranium" which in my interpretation would be the use of Air Ka (perception, knowledge etc) and Earth Ka (Uranium as a mineral). The Power point or Ka costs of each effect was determined using the Hero Point cost of an equivalent power available in Superworld (one of my all time favorite games, so glad its out again in pdf). The maximum number of Ka one could spend on any single effect was equal to their initial elemental assignation as part of the intial character generation. The other thing I did was give a hell of a lot more skill points for each reincarnation, that way people who were essentially a thousand years old were ridiculously competent at stuff (they should be). Shouit I handled as a modification of Cthulhu Sanity rules. The whole thing came off like some kind of "Highlander" thing with flashbacks to past lives, but with a lot of byzantine secret society stuff. It didn't last long but it made it through a whole summer, and it was pretty fun. That was going back maybe a dozen years or more. NOw that I've reopened that repressed area of my psyche, I might just have to dust off the old game and unleash it on some unsuspecting gamers.>:->