That can hardly be true (considering ToEF itself is start of mid-game..and I don't know why you wouldn't want to be crowned before that [even on like merchant or thief]). There's a lot of good sense in crowning before the water temple, as well.

Also 'suck it up' is hardly a helpful attitude..

It's perhaps not what you want to hear. Sometimes it can be quite helpful advice.

The point is not that PCs aren't going to want to be crowned (obviously they want to be crowned starting from level 1) - it's that it perhaps shouldn't be as easy as farming tons of weed. The point is that perhaps the fact that deities assigned enormous value to a simple plant that can be harvested in enormous numbers is the silly part of it all. It might have gone unchanged for ten years - but that doesn't really make it any less silly.

Are easy stomafillia crownings another sacred cow that we must not touch?

Sounds to me like the solution to that is to fix the shop interface, etc, rather than to reinstate actual grinding for herbs.

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the issue here, but does this actually fix anything? With a little herb farming and some cooked lizards you can wait around in Dwarftown for Sis to replicate and then either sac them or sell them and sac the gold. Optionally you can expend a little holy water and speed things up somewhat but you're still essentially trading time on the clock for sacrifice fodder.

Or do what I do and continue the plot while the Si's grow. Atleast I'm not standing still, which was the case with the Stomafillia.

Don't sis replicate more slowly than herb regenerate?

According to the guidebook herbs are 1d1000 turns and the Si is just 1000 turns. Sis do grow exponentially though.

More importantly, Sis weigh 10s each, while stomafillia herbs weigh 2s each, and I could be mistaken, but I think that Sis are worth less in piety than stomafillia. And because Sis grow exponentially, they're slower at first, and then grow so quickly that you could suddenly get crushed.

But most importantly, one can use Sis without grinding.

That said, I think I suggested modifying ongoing sacrifice values for items, so that sacrificing a lot of something will result in lesser total piety. If the PC gives up one stomafillia herb, the god should be very pleased at the PC giving up something that is so valuable. But if the PC is giving up hundreds of stomafillia herbs, the god would start thinking that stomafillia must be relatively easy for the PC to obtain, and consider it not as good a sacrifice as would be expected if they were all worth as much as the first one.

If each subsequent sacrifice (keeping in mind that sacrificing 100 of them at once would be equivalent to sacrificing them one at a time in this regard) were to be lower by, say, 1%, and we suppose that the first one is worth 100 piety points (just to emphasise the resulting number), then sacrificing 100 of them gives you about 6340 piety points, or less than the equivalent of 64 full sacrifices. I'd make gold work a bit more gently, perhaps choosing it to drop by 1% per 1000, and I wouldn't place such a restriction on live sacrifices.

Yes, according to rumours, live sacrifices are the most valuable. It is still a rumour.