It's because without paying close attention to your abilities or the forums it's hard to tell what those attributes actually do; the common initial impression is that you're losing damage as you level therefore you must put all points into primary attribute. However, it turns out that your abilities scale up and not putting points into your primary attribute simply normalizes you. So people get hung up with the UI displaying -5-18% damage.
It's also hard to see how the later spells have value since you're stuck at 5 Memory and constantly are dumping points into whatever stat making those 3 slot spells unusable because the other slots are dedicated to the usual suspects - adrenaline, rage, teleport, whatever.
But as soon as you shrug and say, fuck it, and take that 10% hit and look for gear that increases memory you suddenly get exposed to so many more options and the higher level spells simply outscale the lower level ones and you can finally actually use them.
