Scaling is a strange beast.
Levels and gear are meant to symbolize your character strength and progression (and give positive feedback to the player), but character strength runs counter to player skill. When a gamer obsessively checks everything to not miss anything, in the process he's lowering the difficulty of future encounters by stacking experience points and gear. If you love the game and explore all of it in one run, you are slightly ruining your experience aswell.
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In my opinion, RPG developper should get rid of character levels and think the progression differently (in term of character abilities, or esthetics, or...), and reintroduce a level system only when it brings something. Because most of the time, it is just an artifact that is being brought out of habit and that brings its lot of problems while not being particulary significant in the first place (and worse: give headache to players who don't like having to theorycraft all this shit).
There's always going to be a huge issue with balancing side content vs. main content. People who complete side content should gain some sort of advantage, but it shouldn't trivialize the main story as it so often does. Level scaling smooths that out, but I'll admit it can take away from the sense that the side content actually made you more powerful.
A level-less RPG is an interesting concept, but hard to pull off without turning it into an action RPG that emphasizes reflexes and fine motor skills as opposed to tactics and strategy. A turn-based one where you merely obtain more skills (but don't increase your health or levels or anything like that) that allow you to do more complex maneuvers sounds hard to design, but not impossible. At a certain point, it'd be more of a puzzle game than an RPG, but I think the lines can blur as it is. If you're improving your stats as you progress, you basically have a leveling system without calling them levels. Levels exist largely as a convenience to generalize your and creatures' power.
I guess I find a complete loathing of level scaling in all forms to be kind of funny. I mean, RPGs are already prescaled (fixed levels) so that there's a perfect progression of enemies as it is. I just don't see post level scaling as that big of a step beyond creating a world already basically designed for you to win.
