What I meant in terms of new ideas was basically a card providing one potion, cards providing 2 buys and then a card which provides way more actions than you need unless you have some sort of adequate drawing support. Although, there are some obvious correlations between my cards and existing cards. The observations about Secret Council, Grand Lab, Chainsaw and Storage facility are all very accurate and that's exactly how I named them. Maybe "Logger" or "logging corporation" would be a better name for chainsaw. I came up with some of the names just off the top of my head.
Like I said in my initial post, I haven't tried playing with any of these yet. So, I hadn't even really thought much about peon at all, especially multiples and tracking. I agree that it would have tracking issues, but I really hadn't thought about that one. (By the way, peon is quite obviously inspired by pawn.) I had also noticed the dangers of +2 buys, mostly in context of a Gardens or Goons strategy.
The motivation for Secret Society was Conspirator, and so the idea that it would act a lot like a Grand Market seemed natural to me. The idea was to create some sort of card which provided a potion. However, if this card is the only card in the game with potion in its cost, it still needs to be worth buying. So, the card needs to be powerful on its own. Grand Market and Conspirator are both quite powerful as cantrip silver so that's the ability I thought would work well. I had also noticed the comparison between Potion and Silver, although I thought of potion mostly as $2+ rather than strictly $2.5. That was not only motivation for cost, but also for the choice between $2 and a potion.
As pointed out, the Bull is basically a chapel. One interesting idea I had thought of was Bull as a defence against Torturer. You just take the curses, and then trash 5 cards, gaining a gold in hand. Another possibility with the Bull to emphasize its ability would be to make it cost 5 where it can only be opened with on a 5/2 split. However, then I think its ability would have to be stronger to make it worth getting. Just a thought.