Ret scaling, Leveling up

Everyone always talks about how ret is a "gear dependent spec". And they're right. Whats unfair is how ret scales entirely on gear and has very minimal base damage. To simplify I'm only going to examine physical dps, as casters get new ranks that obviously scale well for leveling.

Examples :

Rogues - Sinister Strike - Weapon damage + X, Eviscerate - High damage but doesnt scale well, great for leveling.
Warriors - Heroic/Mortal Strike - Weapon damage + X
Hunters - Multishot - Damage + X, Pet Damage, Aimed shot - Damage + X, Steady Shot at 62+.
Druids - Claw - Damage + X, Mangle - Damage + X
Paladins - No inherent base damage on their primary damage abilities. For secondary abilities, they have Judgement of Command, which does awful base damage, doesnt scale at all with gear, and has a DPM of something like 0.5 compared to using Rank1 SoC. Stunning the target beforehand also has a mana expenditure and only increases the DPM to 0.33 or so. Spammng judgements also breaks FSR regen which can be used by paladins to some effect. SoC procs have a "base" damage through JoTC and the 20% coefficient SoC gets, however you spend tons of mana doing this, and it really isnt a base damage value since you need to apply a judgement to possibly add at most 40 to your RNG damage.
Shamans - In the same boat as Paladins, no base damage on any primary damage abilities, besides shocks.

Basically this means that an undergeared rogue/warrior/hunter/druid is always going to beat an equivalently undergeared paladin/shaman in physical damage simply by virtue of free damage granted by their class. For leveling this is huge. Base damage is meant to smooth out undergeared fights, and is why ret/enhance leveling is so frustrating unless you constantly slot upgrade your gear as you level. What this means is ret will underperform any competitive dps situation, preventing many from getting groups as ret, making it very hard to gear up. Without gear they'll never get to the point of meaningful damage, and thus the spec is in a catch22 situation. Arena is pretty much the best way to get around this, and it is quite unfortunate that the only viable way to gear for PvE as ret is to arena.

TLDR : With gray weapons, completely naked, paladins will be dead last in damage in any fight. That gap lessens, but other classes maintain a huge lead in damage until at least high end blues/full epics at 70.