Why current mana fixes don't work from a balance perspective

The issues with mana in the day and age stem from a combination of high mana costs and small mana pools. Spells take large chunks of total mana each, which causes most mages to burn out rather quickly. The normal fix to this has been regen items like Athene's that out-regen the expenditure. This, of course, wasn't healthy, because casters could spam forever.

Instead, increasing mana totals (with a splash of regen) could be a healthier alternative. Having more mana available means that your spells eat less percentage wise per cast, increasing your time/casts before running dry. This also has the side effect of making regen more powerful; the larger your pool, the more time the regen has to work.

Currently, pure mana options like Tear and RoA often fall short due to ramp up times and power-spike delay that most mages simply can't afford. However, a Mage with a Seraph's can cast a lot longer than normal, which, again, makes his regen matter more, and increases his time doing stuff, but more importantly does not stop him from eventually running dry.

This is a healthy interaction. Offering mages CDR options that promote mana pool rather than regen could make this problem better for both ends of the argument. Items like Morello's could be differently itemized to support their intended usages rather than being "buy this->lolmana."

Thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

Some notes:

Currently, stacked Tear+Athene's basically means your mana bar stops existing, but is too weak in raw power stats to matter.

A possible suggestion would be to take off some/all of Athene's regen in exchange for adding raw mana to it (which increases the value of its mana font anyways) to help solidify its intent as the "cast for a long time" item, without pushing it back into unlimited mana for one purchase. This also increases the synergy with Seraph's, which is fine because currently the items want to play nice currently but just...don't. Seraph's+Athene's would cause endless mana, but it takes a lot of time for that to happen, and in the meanwhile makes you have to pay for the investment before you're stacked. This is fine because of the trade off and risk, in exchange for potential reward.