Really, this is a very general issue with games; people don’t actually want to be dealing with numbers in the course of their gaming, because every bit of math that they’re required to do on the fly slows down the game. Quite frankly, people have enough trouble adding together all the numbers on their damage dice when they’re up to throwing four or more dice at the same time… much less trying to figure out some real math, like an exponent. The intellectual ability or mathematical skill of the participants is mostly irrelevant; you’re not trying to do math problems, you’re trying to play a game. Anything that makes you focus more on arithmetic, and less on killing orcs, is something you don’t actually want to do while playing a game.
Really, this is a very general issue with games; people don’t actually want to be dealing with numbers in the course of their gaming, because every bit of math that they’re required to do on the fly slows down the game. Quite frankly, people have enough trouble adding together all the numbers on their damage dice when they’re up to throwing four or more dice at the same time… much less trying to figure out some real math, like an exponent. The intellectual ability or mathematical skill of the participants is mostly irrelevant; you’re not trying to do math problems, you’re trying to play a game. Anything that makes you focus more on arithmetic, and less on killing orcs, is something you don’t actually want to do while playing a game.