On the Wolves leaving behind their lower castes:
Furthermore, while they took their best and
brightest scientists, technicians and merchants, the vast majority
of the labor castes—the people who actually ran things—were
abandoned as well.
The "vast majority" of the Clan's pool of support personnel were abandoned. It's a black and white fact, barring whatever unreliable authorship factor one wants to ascribe onto the quote. Yes the Wolves kept hold of their "best and brightest" of the lower castes, but what percentage can that possibly be? Objectively: the inverse of a "vast majority". The Wolf Empire probably retained enough lowercastemen to serve as a leadership cadre, but that leadership cadre is overseeing a sphereoid body of support personnel. And that's even before looking at how many sphereoid militiamen are rebranded as full-fledged Warriors (second line, but still Warriors) in the Wolf Touman.
The same "Wolf Empire" sub-chapter goes on to mention how the Empire has about as much infrastructure that can build Clan-spec as they did in 3050 when they overran the FRR: none. They can use captured academies to train/mint more sphereoid warriors. By implication, their trueborn birthing program is either on hold or restricted to their remaining WarShips. (although they surely have at least some sibko cadets mature enough for being put into the field, and the "best and brightest" of the scientist caste surely are caretaking a temporarily mothballed creche program)
On the Empire only holding on to the territory it has thanks to the chaos of the Dark Age:
With their military forces focused on external
conflicts, the Wolves will lack the numbers to enforce their
authority over the local populations, and they know it. If it wasn’t
for the Blackout creating an atmosphere of uncertainty, there would
probably already be rebellions in the streets.
So anyway what I've been saying over the last page or so is that the Wolf Empire is well on its way to being drowned in "sphereoidness". They don't have the infrastructure to maintain let alone expand their Touman (same page quotes the Wolf Empire as being dependent on the Sea Foxes to acquire any Clan-spec materiel) and they don't have the numbers, even with absorbing sphereoids wholesale, to maintain the reins of empire as only the chaos of the Dark Age (namely, the dire straits of their neighbors) is allowing their conquests to hold steady.
I envision that the Wolves don't have any intention of holding on to their "Empire" and are simply using the worlds as a staging point to leap at Terra. They'll either succeed in their "leap of faith" and become ilClan, or they won't. Someone's gonna be ilClan, so they're a better bet than most to become it. But if they do fail, having burned all their bridges to get to where they can make their leap of faith will at the very least strip them of their "Clan-ness" and best case scenario, become just another Inner Sphere rump state between the FWL and LC.
