What I know about SCA culture I've absorbed from various friends. That said, I suspect you're right and McGuire deliberately builds the structure of the Faerie Courts on SCA courts. The courts don't become less important as the series continues. At the beginning of A Local Habitation (#2), Toby returns to active status as a knight of Shadowed Hills serving Sylvester. The idea of fealty, as handled there and elsewhere throughout the series, owes more to SCA governance than it does to medieval vassalage.

Also... if you're worried about distracting echoes, you probably want to know that most of A Local Habitation is set in a fae-owned high-tech company in the South Bay.

That is to say, if you bounced off Book 1 because it was too familiar in the wrong ways, I don't think Book 2 will be an improvement for you.