Well, his ineffectualality is dependent on the job he was actually given. Sure, he was raising Maric's illegitimate son, but Maric never recognized Alistair as his, so Eamon's job may have been to keep Alistair out of trouble and keep him ever feeling like he'd have a chance at being king so as to prevent a civil war, preserve Rowan's dignity in the eyes of the people, and generally keep him from ever feeling like he'd have any chance of being a threat to Cailan's rule, as ultimately if the nobles knew about Alistair, many probably work to get Alistair on the throne as a puppet-king to advance their own agenda's. And many nobles rebelled after Cailan's death to advance their own agenda's, not just Teagan's idealistic ones.
If his job was to keep Alistair down, out of the way, and unnoticed, Eamon would have done a superb job at it.
If any of that was Maric's intention, why didn't he just have Alistair killed and been done with it? Loghain would have done the deed and not even felt bad about it.
Sending him to Eamon to be looked after seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to for a child you don't care about. If you go with the assumption that Fiona is Alistair's mother, then the whole thing makes much more sense. Fiona didn't want Alistair raised with knowledge of his parentage so that he could live his life free of the burdens of who his parents were. This would explain why Maric placed Alistair in Eamon's care (Redcliffe is about as far from Denerim as you can get), since Eamon was his brother-in-law and an ardent royalist, he could be reasonably trusted to look after to the boy. Personally, I always thought that making Alistair think he could never be king was Eamon's way of ensuring that his blood nephew would inherit the throne without the threat of the illegitimate bastard creating instability. Of course, never telling Alistair that his father was the king would have seemed like a more effective way of achieving the same result. I suspect a bit it was pettiness at Maric having a child with someone else after Rowan's death, which he took out on Alistair. I imagine he did the letter of his duty to Maric (ensuring the boy was fed, clothed, and housed), but otherwise tried to keep him at arms length. But in spite of himself and his anger at Maric, he ended up becoming fond of Alistair, hence his visits to the Chantry and repairing the amulet.
Regarding the nobles, I felt that they rebelled mainly against Loghain's attempt to simply take other without the Landsmeet having a say, as is the established process. If Loghain had gathered the Landsmeet and submitted himself as a candidate, they might well have elected him, but he stormed in like a bull in a China shop and just tried to bully everyone into submission and so they rebelled against his temerity and disrespect to them.
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