I'm quite new to this game, so don't take anything I'll say seriously.
Mathematically, 1 arms and 2 arms is around the same carms value, which should be more than 1400, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. Any four arm solution has a carms of more than 1300 because of latency restriction. Thus, 3 arms is the way to go.
To make the glyph of animismus run at full capacity, i.e. 4 cycles per vitae, you need 3 arms. I would be surprised if you could output 13 vitaes with the same arms. An idea would maybe be some way to mix 4 cycle and 5 cycle vitae rates. My solution has 5 cycle per vitae with an optimal ending. This is why I believe I'm at least close to min, and which is why I optimized area a little. Area can definitely be improved further, but I'm not seeing any easy optimizations anymore, so I'm calling it here.