I also agree that the flavor here was awesome. I don't think scum was as screwed as Yuma made them out to be, but I agree that if Town had claimed who they had chosen during the PR distribution phase, scum may have been caught in a lie. The powers themselves don't really matter too much since nothing can be totally confirmed and scum can fakeclaim whatever isn't chosen with Knowledge, but I thought the setup as a whole was well thought out and a cool experiment.
Yes, I think I over-exaggerated the risk to mafia, partially because I still didn't fully understand.
But for me the main issue was that the full mafia team wasn't given a choice as to whether or not they could participate or fake claim. By mandating that everyone except for the mafia team participate they were doomed to need a fake claim (that could have caught them out) if town chose to go down that road.
In a typical game Mafia at least always has the option of being able to claim VT. That is a fall back claim that is "relatively" safe. In this game mafia couldn't claim to not have voted for anyone as per the rules all town players were required to vote for someone. Anyone who was not participating was therefore defaulted to be mafia and that I thought was the problem. So I think in the future, if this setup is run again, a fix would be to either give each individual mafia member a vote (and then maybe raise the level up one on each tier?) or to allow town members to not cast votes, and thus allow mafia to safely claim the same.