The only universality that I offer is that there is no universality. But just as I might say nothing is forever, you could reasonably argue that everything is forever.
And of course taking the scales out of their relative balance will skew things. But the fact is that all factors taken into account, the scales are "generally" well balanced, in that there are strategic avenues to exploit the relative bonuses gained.
Take for example, if in a particular scenario, you were given perfect temp scale, and you were allowed +3 on ALL scales except for 1, that MUST be at -3. I can guarantee you 90% of the people who read these boards would put 3 Sloth with impunity. But strategically speaking, any of the scales would provide viable strats for one nation or another, depending on what is planned. Arbitrarily changing the value of one scale does not change the answer to the question, it changes the question to - "why am I still playing this horribly imbalanced game?".
Fortunately, our wonderfully thoughtful and intelligent game devs saw fit to not make any one scale stand out sufficiently to make it absolutely necessary to a viable game strat - and that is why most of us are here now.
