My wife is working on the Consortium rep grind.

Conclusion: running heroic Mana Tombs is faster and easier.

Due to over-farming, she moved to the Zaxxis guys south of Area 52, and has been farming those for 2-3 days now (14k down, about 12k to go). They also drop keys, which is a boost to the rep farming, and the zaxxis insignias help quite a bit.

The actual Ethereum prison chains are annoying, and really serve little purpose except to do it once to get the 5 "free" badges (last stage, when you kill the imprisoned guy inside heroic MT, the quest reward is supposedly 5 heroic badges).

Do the early quests to get the gold, then forget about it.

For the Consortium grind, Mana Tombs is definitely the way to go. One run equals at least 2000 rep if not more, plus you get prison keys (average around 4-5 per run). Once done, instead of using 5 prison keys to get the key to summon Yor again, use them for the repeatable prison ID quest in netherstorm, which nets you 250 rep per completion.

Even though the ID isn't guaranteed each time, the only way it's less rep is if you only get 1 ID out of 5 keys, which hasn't happened to me yet (worst I've gotten was 3/5). The drawback is that you don't get the item or badge from Yor, but at exalted you'll be able to summon him anytime you want.

I have been grinding Consortium casually, mostly for reputation.

Mobs at the Heap definitely drop more keys than the ones at the staging grounds. For every 10 Zaxxis Insignias I get around one key. It works out to about 40 kills/30 minutes per 1000 rep (20 Insignia+2 250 rep key turnins). Not a bad rate IMO. There is more competition at the heap though, I think.

The nice thing about the keys is that you a chance at the blue resistance capes and rings. Already got a Living Band of Power (27sta, 18nr, 34ap) and a Fiery Cloak of Agility (27sta, 18 fire resist, 17 agility), from what I can tell pretty much the best fire resist cape in the game so far.

I would have to agree that heroic mana-tombs is a blessing when trying to grind consortium rep. Pre-2.1 I ran that place a lot, simply to hit exalted. Once oyu get a group of people who know the instance, and have enough SR for the first boss, its pretty much a joke.

Pre patch, however, it was much better for rep because of the summoned adds that gave good deals of rep(Shaffar''s adds gave 21 rep per kill pre patch, now they give 4). On the other hand, now with the patch you can get 3-6 keys per run which makes actual grinding much easier.

its just easiest if you get 3-4 people who seriously want consortium rep, and just work on doing a heroic mt every day, it'll make grinding to exalted much easier.

Do the Netherwing quests just continue from Mordenai in Shadowmoon Valley? If not, where do you obtain them?

Yes. If you hadn't read it a million times already, you need to have purchased 300 riding skill before Mordenai will give you the quest continuation.