While Farimon had his own limitations when he invented the Farimon Chamber, he was working in an area of the world with a lot of counter-culture mages trying to find the next “big thing” (including sex and drugs, let's be honest). That means that his discovery set off an avalanche of other ideas riffing on his idea.
One of them was the core, which shows up in Flight of the Scions as a portal (but more fragile) version of the chamber. The core was a “battery” form of heat, effectively something that would later be critical to some of the war stories as the mecha are built around having a steady supply of cores (and what happens when they get hit by a strong enough feedback they explode).
I always saw Farimon as being someone who would get insanely jealous about those extra inventions and the latter part of his life becoming less about pushing the bounds of magic and more about legally attacking anyone who “stole” his ideas.
If you can't guess, I don't like Farimon but the idea that we ignore the faults of those we put on pedestals to be important in the world.