Yeah... Aspiring + Familiar is definitely the anomaly since it's the only cubic scaling in the game. I'm currently in the process of looking at all the least used followers and see if there can be a similar cubic scaling mechanic, but it's tricky since the while system is reeeaaally not designed to have scale infinitely (as in endless mode). Multiplying dancer's attack could work since charging aspect is the only way to make dancer attack twice and it's already pretty rare, I'll do some testing on that to see if it'll be too op. However, artificer and dragoon will be hard to implement, since the "+1 to all values" effect is not a variable, but a different version of the follower; and what dragoon is doing is change the first aspect into its intrinsic trait instead of actually getting 2 aspects.
I agree that early game need some small adjustments. The current plan is to adjust the spawn rate of initiate and supplicant when the player is on low faith and make the 4-choice recruit events show up 1-2 depth early. Hopefully that'll make the early game feels more fair.