That's strange logic. If you are going to have +10 armor eventually, why don't you start with it?
That's part of the choice you have to make. Are you going to start with excellent armour, forgoing spell books and focusing on arcane research. Or are you going to start with the spell books and research armour (You don't usually have enough character creation points to actually do both). The main difference is weapon and armour research can b used by your troops as well, where as spell research can't. So it's no ideally balanced. Any sensible person given the choice would start with the spell books and devote the research time to armour.
But more overly the spell books are just access to the spells, they aren't the spells themselves. By the time you can effectively research any powerful spell from any given book that might make the book unique, you can have all the books available by that point easily anyway. So my point was starting with them or not doesn't make that much of a difference to how unique the channeller is. That's why I suggested a better solutions is limiting (and perhaps randomising a bit) which unique spells they can get their hands on in each book.
You want to talk about uniqueness and individuality... Even specialists in a specific school of magic should have different styles. Having the book of fire and not having the book of fire shouldn't determine uniqueness. Two or more fire mages should be able to have different play styles. Again limiting spell access a bit is probably the best way to achieve this. Lets say there are 4 level 10 spells that represent the peak of a fire mages power. To make the mages unique you'd limit each mage to only being able to pick one of them initially and make each subsequent one increasingly harder to acquire. While you are at it don't just make it harder, make it uncertain when and even if they will acquire it. That way each spell they choose will be unique to their preferred play style. Four fire mages of equal power, but one summons volcanoes, one summon meteors, one has the ability to grant entire armies flaming weapons and one can make large groups of people spontaneously combust.
That's the kind of variety I think we should be aiming for. Now when you consider the channellers, aren't just limited to fire magic, but actually have to make these selective decisions with 6 or more spell schools... You'll start getting much more unique spell compendiums. Even with all the spell books at their disposal players will specialise as well. If they look though the Air spell book and think to themselves "hey that spell would be cool, but I don't like the other spells of that level and I can't be certain the one I want will come up any time soon... But all of the Water spells look cool...", then they'll start to specialise as result of priorities.
Something else to consider is even if you have all the spell books, you can't research spells from all of them at once. You have to pick one spell at time. If you pick one from each book one after the other you'll take a damn long time to reach the high level spells from any book (ideally). So you'll get people specialising as water/life mages and Earth/Air mages... Even if they do have all the spell books and one or two spells from different schools in them in their arsenal.
Limiting which spell books are available isn't really going to solve the problem. Especially the way things are now with each spell book having a huge section identical to each other one with it's own elemental tag attached. I mean look at the book of water: Summon water elemental, Summon frost giant, hurl ice for up to INT damage, freeze 9 squares for up to INT damage. Now look at fire: Summon fire elemental, Summon fire Giant, Hurl fire for up to INT damage, burn 9 squares for up to INT damage... This is not strictly speaking a bad thing, it means each book is balanced so someone who does choose to specialise in water magic isn't gimped in combat compared to a fire mage. Now I have not played the current version long enough to see all these spells and I'm possibly representing them wrong... But I think my point is clear that saying you can only have the water spell book and you can only have the fire spell book, currently is not going to make either party all that unique.
I mean your entitled to disagree with me but my opinion at the moment is changing and limiting how spells are obtained would be much more effective then changing and limiting spell book availability.
