But Renown does not do what it set out to do. The only way to raise this (except the first 5 levels) is by clicking repeatedly on an item in your inventory. As such, raising Renown is nothing but a grind, and has no connection to any RP. (and remember that the original intent was to have this represent how famous and/or infamous you are to a faction).

But the Favours and Renown system wasn't billed as providing difficult achievements for end-game players. The system has to accommodate players of all types, and right now, it doesn't. Favours work well as they are; regularly gaining and spending them is far more interesting than having and ignoring a high level of Connected. They're mechanically useful and allow for more interesting narration.

Renown, on the other hand, just does not work well for anybody in its current form. Before now, newer players might run up against an action that for example required Connected 10 to some particular faction. Figure out how to interact with the faction a little, and suddenly that new option opens up. Now, an option that required Connected 10 might require Renown 10. A newer player trying to unlock that option has to figure out where Renown comes from, acquire the necessary cash, then sit around waiting to draw the right cards. Meanwhile endgame players grinding Renown can't actively do anything towards their goal; they have to just sit back and hope they get lucky with cards.

The issue with Renown is that there's nothing besides the grind. Unlike with Connected, your character's choices are irrelevant here and playing through stories is useless. We only get a slow trickle of Favours, so why make us spend them all (plus a steady influx of cash) to make any progress here? Limiting Favours to cards makes sense since they're so profitable, but why so with Renown? In my opinion, Renown should behave like quirks. Mundane options like selling Casing to the Constables would have low caps, harder and more unusual options like failing to rob the Brass Embassy would have medium caps, very difficult or one-time options like assisting in the Battle of Wolfstack Docks would have high caps or none at all. That way it would be possible to actually do something to grind Renown, even if it was difficult and slow or only mattered at low levels.

There is a separate discussion going on here as well

Well, I always looked at it as something you work toward as you play the game, not something that you specifically decide to say "I'm going to work on this today." So as you play, you draw the cards that give you the favors, just like, in game, you go abut your life and have random encounters with various factions that can affect your standing with them.

So to me it feels like a representation of your character's life in-game.

But man, I look back over the years and all the connections I spent for basically no reason because they were useless and what I got from the connections I had left, and it's hard not to feel a little sore. I did stories connected with Hell and I got exactly 0 renown on conversion.

That means the Constables conversion is almost twice as harsh as the Urchins one!

...so whatever level of connected one could obtain with 7 actions would translate to one level of renown?

If you came upon a house under construction, you wouldn't expect it to have all the features of a complete house, but you wouldn't ask someone to live there and make use of the facilities either.