Ruin Explorer
Legend
Those people have severely mislead you. There's absolutely nothing in 5E HtR about "bureaucracy is magically evil".
Digging through (I literally opened to the book to see what I could find) the only thing I can find that even might make someone think that is that organisations are listed on a diagram as "possible secondary antagonists", because the goals of an organisation (that you might or might not work for) might conflict with your personal goals as a Hunter. They are absolutely not "magically evil", though, that's literally nonsense that someone has made up and told you. Indeed it's reasonable and likely that say, the part of the FBI that deals with supernatural threats might conflict with you as a Hunter, even if you work for them - c.f. the X-Files.
There's also a single line in the discussion of organisations - "Many agencies that exist ostensibly to protect the public instead act as enforcers of the status quo, concerned more for their own benefit and autonomy than they are about putting down monsters." - This is hardly a controversial or extreme viewpoint. It's literally how the world works IRL (particularly re: law enforcement, religious orgs, etc.). And note it's not "all agencies" or even "most agencies" it's "many", which could mean 60% or could mean 10%.
I feel like whoever told you this didn't really read HtR 5E very closely, and instead went into it with oWoD HtR vibes and then just made a lot of extreme and silly assumptions based on scanning the text and not reading it.
You can literally work for whoever you like in HtR 5E, whether it's the Vatican or the FBI or the gig people or individuals like the Equalizer or no-one at all!
The default situation is that PCs are freelancers who are not permanently chained to any specific organisation, not because they're anarchists or primitivists, but because they're truly driven to hunt monsters whereas people in the organisations generally primarily follow the precepts and rules of those organisations. At no point does the book imply this is "evil" or "bureaucracy" (indeed some of the orgs are anti-bureaucratic in any normal sense), or even that the orgs are useless or something - merely that they may conflict with the truly driven Hunters. And the default situation is that the PCs are contacted and contracted by the organisations because this is an easy way to give the PCs missions with clear parameters and rewards. But if you don't want to work for them, don't! And if you want to run a campaign where the PCs always work for the Vatican there's literally nothing stopping you, either conceptually or mechanically. It just encourages you to have this cell of freelancers because that's the default mode of play and the one which would require the least prep/effort from the Storyteller.
You could work for any of those in HtR 5E.
The way it's split up in 5E isn't by set specific pre-existing organisations but general ways of operating/drives:
Entrepreneurial
Faithful
Inquisitive
Martial
Underground
If you work for/with an organisation they break down into
Academic
Corporate
Government
Religious
Vigilantes
There are also quite a few specific organisations detailed but I won't go into details in case it's spoilers somehow, beyond to say that there are multiple detailed examples of all of the above types, and one of them is even Orpheus from nWoD. I didn't notice any of the Vigil ones but I'm less familiar with those, and you could absolutely introduce any Vigil one you wanted.
Note, again, I'm not even a fan of this - I wanted an HtR game to be an HtR game, and this is clearly a Vigil game.
I will say that as with the WtA 5E, the designers didn't come up with pre-existing organisations that are really as vivid or pulp-y as the Vigil ones, but yeah that's part of the general 5E downgrade. The designers just don't have the verve, nerve or style of either the oWoD or nWoD designers. But as I said, you could easily just use Vigil's ones - that's one of the things HtR 5E has going for it - it's more of a toolkit with a bit of a setting than a really seriously specific setting and powers like the old HtR was.
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