It would be baseless if I didn't point out the many elements I used as a basis.
Analysis is the art of taking facts and knowledge and combining them into information and knowledge. It's what you do every time you take two non-explicitly linked points and make a conclusion from them- it's not magic, and even if people can disagree on the conclusions it's not irrational or somehow illegitimate. It's how anyone comes to any understanding of anything.
Your conclusions and implications are baseless on the merit that you made them while looking at only part of the picture and ignored in-game conclusions that are a product of events that we cannot see.
I do not recall any mention in Dragon Age Inquisition of thousands of mages maintaining a stronghold in Andoral's Reach at the point of the Conclave and Inquisition. In fact, the only mentions I can find of it at all via google and DA wiki searching are related to Asunder- that Andoral's Reach was likely to be an early battle of the war.
But that makes it old news, years out of date. What the mages intended to do or how much resolve they intended to show at the start of the war is irrelevant to their standing at the end. It's not particularly relevant to the context of the game (which focuses on the Mage-Templar situation immediately post-Conclave and places it in the Hinterlands), it's not any more critical to understanding the end-point of the rebellion than the rest of the multi-year rebellion, and the fact that the Mages had a stronghold doesn't inherently or even implicitly contradict later developments and Mage's own leader (the best authority figure on the Mage Rebellion's standing since, you know, she's running it) depiction of the conflict. Win, lose, whatever the initial outcome of Andoral's reach, it doesn't matter if three-odd years later they've since abandoned it..
I am always happy to revise my conclusions in the face of new evidence, but you're the first I can recall to suggest that Andoral's Reach is somehow still active when DAI says that the remaining rebel mages have sought refuge in Redcliffe. Do you have a base to support this speculation?
Do you have a source, any source, that indicates the Mages actively control Andoral's Reach?
The Mages, including Grand Enchanter Fiona, move to Andoral's reach after killing the Templars in the White Spire in Asunder. In the following weeks, Templars crack down harder on the Mages in various Towers causing most to rise up and leave. Many travel to Andoral's Reach Where Fiona calls for another vote and the Mages vote for independence and the dissolution of the Circle of Magi. - Dradon Age: Asunder ch.22. To get a more detailed run down you will have to read the book. This is part of the bigger picture I mentioned. The Mage-Templar war does not, in it's entirety, go down in DA:I but is spread out in multiple media and behind the scenes.
"We, the mages of Ferelden and Orlais, do hereby dissolve the Circles and renounce our sworn submission to the Order of the Templars, effective immediately." - The Free Mages of Thedas
"With the Circle no more, I hereby declare the Accord null and void. Neither the Seekers of Truth nor the Templar Order recognize Chantry authority, and instead we will perform the Maker's work as it was meant to be done, as we see fit." - Lord Seeker Lambert
At this point the Templars march on Andoral's Reach, thinking that the conflict will be over quickly.
"They envisioned the war over quickly; a single battle that would see the mages' resolve crumble, after which they would meekly return to confinement. That did not happen. This conflict could drag on forever, with advantage on neither side. Both templars and mages see this, and thus they have agreed to come to the Conclave." - Codex Entry: The Conclave
Andoral's Reach is the location of the conflict mentioned above, whatever happened in that battle neither side gained an advantage over the other. This standstill is the reason both sides agree to the conclave. http://dragonage.wik...Andoral's_Reach
This event takes place in 9:40 Dragon, only a few months to one year before the beginning of Inquisition. MY SPECULATION is that the Mages would not abandon such a favorable position. There is no information, in-game or otherwise, that shines a light on the situation there, only that neither side decisively prevailed. As I said there is much we don't know and things happening that we cannot see.
We know a fair deal of the general trends of the Mage Rebellion, thanks to Asunder setting the context of the start and Inquisition's various party members and war table missions and Fiona's own asssessment of the mage standing towards the end.
We know practically all the Circles rose up in rebellion, to the point that those that didn't were notable as exceptional minorities (Vivienne's loyalists, the Circle(s) that declared neutrality and sat the conflict out). We know that the Templars conducted initial attacks on the Circles they could at the start of the conflict (source- Asunder), and we know that by the point of Inquisition there are absolutely no mentions of any Circle under siege by the Templars because every Circle that does get mentioned is in the context of (a) having been sacked, ( 
having not rebelled, or © having been abandoned, including the nice big easily defensible Ferelden Circle on an easily defensible island right across the lake that the greatest known concentration of magi of Southern Thedas is living in the greatest fishing village with port infrastructure to support it if they wanted to. This links to Vivienne's personal quest, in which we know that Circles that rose in rebellion were afterwards looted by scavengers, a strong implication that there weren't exactly mage forces present to keep mundanes from stealing their ****, which fits in with the various mentions we know of that the rebel mages fled the Circles. We know that in the opening days of the rebellion there was an internal mage purge of the insufficiently revolutionary before said Circles were abandoned, to the point that the surviving non-rebel mages are established to either fought off the rebels and declared loyalty/neutrality (Vivienne/that neutral Circle), or ran away and went to ground (deny them as an army in the field). We know that the mage leader believed the mages were losing, believed it strongly enough that the prospect of a Templar assault on a formidable and friendly fortress (well-equipped to withstand a siege and await overwhelming reinforcements) was considered grounds to abandon the a war of freedom and independence and seek the relative sanctuary of Tevinter. We know this came at a time where we know the Templars already had active strongholds and had already secured major key terrains and Circle towers across the continent, know that the Templars were consolidated because recall orders were sent to gather as many Templars as possible back at White Spire and that Envy then ordered them to completely abandon the garrisons they did have (including White Spire) to relocate to Therinfell. We know that no such mage equivalent consolidation ever took or takes place if/when we ally with the Mage Rebellion, just as we know that the mage-route war table mentions make mentions of previously hiding Circle mages coming out in light of the alliance but we see nothing about any sort of mage army or major force elsewhere. (Which is, admittedly, an absence of evidence and not evidence of absence, but this is relevant because it corroborates many various points actively established when it would have easily been able to counter them if it were reversed.)
We know that all the advisors in Inquisition and all the party members and all the political actors treat the Circle Mages as a consolidated organizational unit that can only be contacted at one location (Redcliffe), which is repeatedly claimed to be where the Mage Rebellion is without any in-game qualifer that it's just their leadership (and where in-game evidence explicitly establishes that there's more to there- that there's the children and weak mages and tranquil and so on).
We also know, if we think about it with just a little of that 'baseless speculation' I call analysis, that if there were other major mage garrisons across Thedas then we could have had another means to resolve the whole 'mage or templar' choice because we could have just asked them for help.
We know that Fiona couldn't have forced them into long-distance slavery to Alexius just because she agreed to sell the Redcliffe mages into slavery, because she couldn't even enforce organization discipline on the rampaging mage supremacists right outside her gates. We know that the Templars wouldn't be currently sieging Andoral's Reach in-mass or blocking us because we know Envy issued the recall and relocation orders to all the Templars he could as he tried to make them into Red Templars. We can safely assume that if there was an amazing success story of thousands of brave mages who had fought off Templars for years in a struggle that would have been common knowledge for diplomats like Josephine let alone spy masters like we know Leliana to be.
We know by this point the Inquisition has already demonstrated the ability to move to the capital of Orlais itself and send agents across much of Southern Thedas.
Which would be a really, really obvious solution to 'how can we recruit mages to fix the Breach' if the Inquisition could send agents to some notorious bastion of thousands of mages who had held out for years, and kindly point out not only is the world falling apart but also that pretty much all the Templars in Southern Thedas are holed up and hiding on the far end of the continent, and ask if they maybe could pretty please loan maybe a dozen or two mages from those hundreds of veteran combat mages to help close the hole in the sky?
I think, and this is just me, that's there's enough basis floating around to believe that the reason that didn't happen is because it couldn't have happened, and that the most credible reason for that is because there wasn't a major public mage holdout just standing around all confused and unopposed when the Templars followed orders and regrouped the Therinfall.
Probably why, when the world was at stake, we felt we had to make a deal with a Tevinter slave-master instead to try and borrow some mages.
That is a lot of assumption based on little actionable information and in disregard of in-game events and settings. There is no information on Circles under siege because most of the Mages have left them. The Circle of Magi was dissolved. Even if there were Towers under siege that doesn't mean we would necessarily hear about them. Not every event going on in Thedas is going to show up in the game as I'm sure you know. There is much much more we DO NOT KNOW. Much of the fighting happened in the span between Asunder and Inquisition in which a standstill was declared. We know little of what happened during that time but we do know the result. We don not know the Mage-Templar situation in Nevarra. We do not know the Mage-Templar situation in the Anderfels. Through Inquisition we are given but a glimse of a conflict that could be spanning a continent. You can use information presented in Inquisition to speculate but to make solid conclusions differing from those presented in-game is fictitious.
That's rather the point. The ones remaining were defectors who refused orders- which indicates there were a whole lot more Templars, there and elsewhere, who did follow orders.
You brought them up as an example of Templar presence in the Hinterlands which is not the case. The main host of Templars following orders is elsewhere.
Which makes them locations that are impossible for the Rebel Mages to call power centers. Since the would-be rebel mages are already, you know, dead and scattered. Even without Templar undue influence and power base in Kirkwall, those are two areas we can safely assume are NOT mage bastions in the current day mage rebellion, because those bastions were overrun at the start.
You could argue that the surviving mages might have tried to wage a guerilla war, taking refuge amongst sympathetic locals (more likely in Dairsmuid than Kirkwall), but that would be conceeding my overall point to me. Guerilla warfare is what the people who can't meet you in the open field do. It is an entirely legitimate strategy, but it is also a concession of military weakness.
And yet they left- not keeping it as a bastion. And we know, thanks to DAI, that the Templars had since reclaimed it. Otherwise Envy couldn't have recalled all Templars to it and then abandoned it himself.
That was the point. They wanted to leave the Towers. The Annulment of Kirkwall and Dairsmuid and the uprising at the White Spire happened before the open conflict leading into Inquisition. Before the Circle Towers were dissolved and before the Templars marched against the Mages. You seem to be under the impression that war was declared while the Mages were still inside the Circle Towers. The Templars did not march against the Mages until they left the Towers for independence. Some would argue that the war began after the events in Kirkwall but I am referring to the conflicts in Asunder and Inquisition, the war spread beyond the Towers.
You're right that the victories before the major conflict started are of limited relevance- you're missing that the relevance hurts the mages state at the end of the war far more than it hurts the Templars. Templar annullments before the conflict are not irrelevant because they set the local theatre context. They are the most decisive possible events in their areas- if the mages could have held out in their own stronghold, and prisons are actually surprisingly defensible positions, they wouldn't have been annulled, and after being annulled the mages are dead. Dead mages can't come back later to form an army or hold garrisons. Any area the Templars successfully annulled is a local 'victory' for them in the course of the Mage-Templar War itself because, by definition, they've already killed everyone who didn't submit or escape.
The only way that the rebel mages who escape can count as a serious threat afterwards is if the victorious Templars leave in such numbers to other fronts that the local Templars have trouble handling the rest, or if other Mages come from outside to reinforce and re-constitute. But that's actualy an indication of Templar strength- the Templars can choose to weaken themselves in what is now a low-priority theater and afford to move newly available forces to other fronts. They can have an advantage in the war by weakening themselves locally. But Mages coming from outside are mages who aren't making strongholds elsewhere, and because we know from Fiona that the Mages were losing the war it's more likely that such 'reinforcements' are fleeing their own general defeats than coming to establish a new theater.
On the other hand, mage strength and morale and any victories at the start of the conflict are largely irrelevant to their standing at the end. Mage victory depends on their state and holdings at the end of the conflict (when the mage collective is located in Redcliffe and dependent on outside patrons for protection, be it Ferelden or Tevinter), not the beginning (when there may well have been thousands at at somewhere other than Redcliffe). The current generation of mages can lose at any point along the way if they get wiped out, and by the end their survival is so insecure that the Mage collective agrees to follow Fiona into explicit slavery and expected exile from Southern Thedas rather than laugh at her and throw her out of power.
That is not indicative of a strong, peer rival to the Templars.
But we know that most of the Mages fought their way past the Templars anyway. We know they were a serious threat, hence the annulling of the accord, hence the march, hence the standstill, hence the Conclave. Do you not consider an ememy that can fight you to a standstill and force a meeting on neutral ground a peer? The Mages were never dependent on Ferelden. They held their own against the Templars at Andoral's Reach in Orlais, the center of Templar power, before Ferelden offered to help.
And by the time of Inquisition, the biggest reasons we can point to that the Templars can't purge the remaining mages is that they've either (a) fled and gone to ground hiding, or ( under the protection of Ferelden.
I fully agree that the Templars can't purge or force the remaining rebel mages to submit. I disagree that it's because of the mage's own strength, rather than the mage's getting external support.
But by the time of Inquisition at the end of the war, the biggest reasons we can point to that the Templars can't purge the remaining mages is because the mages have either (a) fled and wentto ground hiding, which is what the Mage Rebellion ultimately does if Fiona leads them into joining the Venatori conspiracy network, or ( behind the national walls of a country like Ferelden, who could beat the Templars in a fight if the Templars started one.
There is never any mention of Ferelden helping the Mages fight at any point before or during Inquisition. Before that point it is clear that the Mages had been fighting on their own and had prepared to be attacked on their own when the Templars attacked them in Orlais. The game paints an opening setting in which both Mages and Templars wish to end a conflict that could go on for years without seeing advantage on either side. Not a setting in which both Templars and Mages with their Ferelden partners wish to end a conflict that could go on for years without seeing advantage on either side. Ferelden offered the Mages food and shelter, they did not field an army and there was never indication that they would have.
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