[Kameron8]

Just to do a brief comparison, an elemental attack heavy build that uses fire attacks and a very, very strong scaling weapon with the two-handed talent (spelledge sword) gets the following stats:

Fire attack: 115
Scaled Weapon Attack: 165

The best fire spell accessible to mages that isn't an invocation is Explosion, with 100% SWA and 140% Elemental attack. This is noticeably higher than most other mage spells, which usually max out at 100% SWA and 120% Elemental attack. With these numbers in mind, you get the following damage:

Explosion: 326 + Tome Power damage.
Fire Jet: 391 damage.

You're correct that maxing out elemental attack takes some odd build tweaking, but at the same time, some of these elements are strictly defensive. While it might be a fair fight to go up against someone crushing your existence with ice and fire spells in the Summoner tree, it's a whole lot more hopeless when the insane damage is coming from stats that boost your defense, resistance, or vitality. Some of these summoner spells, like the aforementioned ice ones in conjunction with two spine leashes, Hunter Wind, which scales itself by 1.3x once you hit it once, get very out of hand very quickly. And those are only the offensive outliers -- Parraeta, Ruby Beam, and Black Rose generally boast an enormous resilience alongside their 300+ damage.

Also, to avoid seeming like I skipped over your point, I simply don't think effort should be taken into consideration too much with things like this. It's the same reason we don't have boss ten star items being blatantly more overpowered than any of the others by design -- SL1 was very effort-driven and walled behind grinding, and it was a huge issue for a lot of people.