You are again only judging from your situation. Ofc no one abuses the system on a private server. But there is a lot of public servers and given the balance for it, a surprisingly high amount of PvP going on.
If TFP really wants to support PvP after launch, like they claimed several times, they shouldn´t rely on a system favoring min/maxing. That would become dull as everyone would do pretty much the same.