Elves don't necessarily have a bad passive, it really depends on how many and which skills you can get. If you can get a lot of the best skills, especially the higher level ones, then it may or may not be pretty powerful, depending on how hard they are to get otherwise. I don't know how insane some of the spell requirements are going to be, from what I can tell it appears that certain spells may end up taking more than one memory slot a piece. In that case, having free spells might offer a wider selection, but I don't know if that'll make it overpowered.
Elves may be able to get spells without having to invest the points, but they still have to pay a memory cost in order to slot them. And there's no guarantee that these spells are going to be the ones that you want.
