I’m currently running a Dungeon-Crawl-ish style game. The actual play is on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4ZooI6efpk&list=PLSU6t1_ggOJ7v8I7uWxxLASTzlBOxZCwF
I completely understand your abjection to Torchbearer. I think it’s a book of interesting ideas and tweaks on the usual BW formula, but it feels completely and severely lacking in the shadow of Burning Wheel. That said, the two have some not-incompatible mechanics. (I haven’t done this yet, but I’m thinking of lifting the Wises mechanics to replace BW wises, for example).
Anyway, when it comes to running adventures, me and my players all love exploration and mystery, but they’re not big on random encounters; so I’ve almost completely removed them. I let players explore their first time through an area with only set-piece encounters and planned events. Then if they re-trace a path, have to backtrack, etc. then I get them to test Orienteering, Navigation, Spelunking, or something similar to travel the distance; and if they fail then I spring an encounter based on margin of failure.
Because of the focus on exploration, myself and my players LOVE maps. But I don’t like using them for battles. I prefer theatre of the mind. I made a melee hack recently https://www.worldanvil.com/w/loke-seraaron/a/melee-article that fits a more traditional OSR style combat system into the game too, which I’ve used, and which works very, but (ironically) doesn’t actually suit my play-style that much: Still you might get some use out of it!
I don’t use traps often. When I do it’s usually in one of two forms: An thing that pretty much explicitly says “this is a trap”, and disarming it is a puzzle, which punishes the players for wrong answers; or as a failure consequence for other tests. (E.g. pick-locking this chest, if you fail you still open it but it’s trapped). I don’t like reactionary traps, because I want to avoid players moving too cautiously or poking everything they see with a 10 foot pole. I like players to know when they’re about to get hit by a trap, so that if they still get hit by it it’s 100% their fault.
Magic breaks everything. Don’t try to account for it, just accept that certain things you carefully designed will get instantly broken or bypassed by magic and clever thinking. At least in the early dungeons. But if your world is self-consistent, then the original in-world dungeon-designers would eventually learn to start incorporating ant-magic related mechanisms and wards into their buildings.
I run with Faith, a custom mix of Sorcery and Summoning as one skill (i.e. Vancian magic), Enchanting, and Corruption. Just remember to give some spells to your villains too. And honestly, for some villains, I’ve started giving them spells that they can cast without testing: Because seeing an NPC fuck their own spells up and ruin the encounter is less fun.
Your places of power idea seems not necessarily ‘too powerful’, but it sounds purely narrative to me. As in, don’t even bother trying to mechanise it. But make it properly signalled to players that this what the candles do. If it does get used on them, let them spend Persona for a complication; instead of hitting them with a Mortal Wound and forcing them to Will to Live + 9 months of infirmary bed-time.