That's a good point. It's hard to balance magic.
Baldur's Gate 2 and Icewind Dale are good examples. Magic users were more powerful in BG2 while magic weapons were more powerful in Icewind Dale. Neither system was balanced well enough, though. The rules seemed fine until you squared off against a powerful mage. Then they had to be tweaked, granting him a significant edge. Otherwise, he didn't stand a chance against a typical party.
There's no shortage of opinions about the way magic should work, either. In the late '70s some guys over at Caltech's computer club came up with their own system for D&D, and some of us used to play over there. Despite the fact that they were quite obviously brilliant, it soon became clear that their rules, and their rules for magic in particular, were no better than the original ones.
Apparently, it's not easy to balance these games and especially magic.
Well, you can balance by numbers or by other ways, such as making a class weak against this and strong against that, etc. Or balance through imbalance.
And there are millions of magic systems in rpgs, from Ars Magica, to shek-pvar in Harn, to a magic system I think is brilliant in the new LotR RPG (not Merp), that is low magic and makes magical spells a rare(er) use, pull out in an emergency, type ability.
The problem isn't lack of ideas, I believe its two-fold. Most game devs would rather be movie devs, and the second problem being us, the consumer. We don't buy good games, and we buy crappy games. NWN 2 is so easy because the people that buy it want an easy game. Find one review that critiques the game for being way too easy or having horrible, retardly easy combat, and a meaningless chardev system (due to the overall ease of the game itself). You won't, because people eaither like it that way or they are so used to not having any sort of challenge provided by a game that they don't notice.
It doesn't matter, its still our fault for being retarded monkeys that buy crap which causes more crap to be made and bought because we'll buy it and love it. This genre is basically dead because we suck. We are stupid and we suck very badly, and because we are stupid and suck, our games are stupid and suck. Theres your answer right there if you want to get down to the nitty-grit. Sure, we don't want to take responsibility for actually being fans of the wrong genre, or liking games geared to the learning curve of retarded three year olds with parkingsons disease and a bad twitch, and base the games value on superficial presentation that would capture the attention of the same three year old, but thats where we are as a community and =thats who our games are designed for.
I'm not saying I'm better, thats why i used "we." I tried Dwarf Fortress a bunch of times, and never got through the map creation screen. This game is supposed to be great, but the fact that it takes 30 minutes to generate a map in ascii graphics really pisses me off. Its an insult of the highest order and it makes me turn angry and smash things, like the same retarded three year old we all resemble. So, I'm losing out on whats supposed to be a great game over something that chalks up to nonsense. But thats how it is, and this is where we are. Thank God for the Indie developers.