I absolutely loathe banking, but for me it's purely a psychological quirk of mine to do with simple UI design. The mechanic is actually quite good, I think (you can choose to save points for something really big later) but few games seem to officially allow you to click a button and "bank" points - the points are just left dangling in a notional limbo that's not marked by the game as "banking" in any specific way. For some reason this irritates my autism no end.
There was once a now-defunct Fallout-like MMO called Fallen Earth, one of whose earlier iterations had quite a good hybrid system (I thought at the time) of mixed leveling-by-use (minor effect), automatic leveling by xp (major effect) and assignable levelling (every few levels you get a fixed amount of bankable points to spend on neat tricks). I think they cocked it up later, but at one time it had a sweet spot feel for me.
I tend to think that having fundamental attributes be too variable, and too much in the hands of the player, is a big mistake that drives a lot of problems (especially bloat). Fundamental attributes should be changeable only temporarily for desperate moments, and only via magic/tech/consumable boosts, otherwise they should be tied to class (in simulationist terms: this particular character must necessarily have the ballpark physical and mental attributes to be an X otherwise they couldn't/wouldn't be an X) and in developer control. What's wanted for the "sense of progression" is horizontal progression into neat tricks, plus progression in the sense of colour "conning."
Admittedly this knocks out ideas like building your own character from scratch or making non-optimal characters for a challenge, but that's a small price to pay for better balance: it's just better for the devs, and frees them up to do more interesting things, if they don't have player-choice variables in terms of fundamental attributes to contend with - or another way of putting it would be, that the cost of having too many variables for devs to juggle with sensibly is too heavy for the relatively minor benefit of the player having the freedom to build characters totally from scratch.
At the end of the day, the numbers are kind of a user-illusion. They go up, but what actually changes? You're still chipping away 10% of the enemy's health with a minor hit, 30% or so with a medium hit and 70% or so with a heavy hit: you're doing roughly the same "thing" all the way through the game, all that changes is the relative oomph and feel of the spectacle, and some numbers that all go up together and so cancel out. The only senses of progression that really matter are: 1) horizontal progression (more neat tricks to play with) and 2) psychologically speaking, relative level (green, blue, white, yellow, orange, red, purple "conning" relative to you - i.e. at the start of the game you can barely cope with 3 even conning (white) mobs, by the end of the game you can handily despatch 3 orange-conning mobs, but still have to be a bit careful with 3 purple-conning.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, progression in the sense of class levels should be more of an rp thing - i.e. an acknowledgement in the virtual world that you've attained a certain level of experience and skill, so you unlock things that are handy to your class, get special missions, etc., and 10 is quite sufficient for that.
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