This is very true.
If one looks at the thread guide by Xevyr about thralls, you’ll see something about hidden multipliers. They affect damage for melee and ranged, as well as Health per Vitality, Armor per Grit, and bonus damage to Agility or Strength weapon damager per Strength and Agility (pets all use Strength weapons). This all uses a template system that has layers of templates that pretty much add all the modifiers together. For a Thrall its Tier, Tribe, Basic Human, and unique stats (if applicable). Pets work the same way.
There is a simple ‘spreadsheet’ (or data table in Unreal), that handles pet damage. Its actually an item in the itemtable that they use as weapons. These weapons are invisible to us (99% of the time, used to be a bug at some point), but they use them.
Rebalancing pets would take altering all of these templates and all of their weapons. Its actually not a hard thing to do, but it takes a tedious amount of time. Time they can take, but they don’t wish to waste it. If they rebalance pets, and then in the next age or two down the line change up the system, they’ll have to go in and change it again.
With what darth has said is entirely probable. The systems are likely getting a change at some point and we need to wait until then for the ‘easier’ changes.
The quickest spells you will see are the ones that are Tier 1 spells.
Outside of that, you can get some balls of fire and poison gas clouds that can be made at the alchemist bench.