I would also like to let the companions level up as their creators intended. If I have to do it myself, everyone will end up more or less optimized and it's not the most interesting or fun route.
I think the point is to level them up as you intend, not as Larian intends.
Game is full of equipment with weird conditional abilities that can't match a simple +1. It seems they don't put a lot of thought into these matters.
I think they did put a lot of thought into magic items. Simple + items are boring. The game has magic items along the lines of what I put into my PnP games.
