In my cooperative game, me and my friend got Pholus at level 1 and by level 13 he was at bartering 7 and charisma 5 with items. We just noticed he wasn't leveling with us when we got to level 16, usually we would look at all the shops and plan a route with him to buy everything we wanted.
The only real problem we saw was that he doesn't force a new inventory to be generated for vendors.
Which is easily solved by talking to the vendors yourself and then using him.
To be frank, i think this bug:
Made using higher leveled henchmen pointless. Why use them when you can get a level 1 and tailor everything to your needs? Do note that if automatic level up for henchman wasn't planned, then indeed it was a bug and i'd prefer that Larian solved the bugs to make the game like they envisioned. However i would like the hireable henchmen to have more diverse dialogue (no need for personal quests, just more diverse dialogue).
Made the game way easier than it is, because without this bug you would be forced to decide if you wanted to have crafting, blacksmithing, bartering, lockpicking and pickpocketing, thus making your character more than something that only knows how to kill and accompanied by mindless slav... i mean hechmen.
Finally, maybe not everything in the game is/was supposed to be played 'as we see fit':
Maybe we HAVE TO sneak past death knights and collapse a mine unto them
Maybe we HAVE TO have a tenebrium weapon to break the big blood stone
Maybe you HAVE TO let Thelyron die even though you can have an unused blood stone with you that you could use to save him.
Maybe we HAVE TO make some important choices regarding our henchmen.
I'm sure other people can say that there are lots of things in the game that can be done only one way and lots of things that can be done in multiple ways or bypassed. Now that i've ranted, i think i like the change, since it will make my next playthrough harder, which is always good.
