Fire vs. Death heavy bless

[Squirrelloid]

So, there seems to be a marked preference for heavy fire blesses over death blesses on this forum. This confuses me greatly.

Fire 9: +6 AP damage +4 attack
Death: +2 AN damage + disease (resistable) + 350% afflictions

Fire pro:
More total damage
Attack bonus helps melee troops

Fire con:
Heavily armored targets won't take all that damage
Bless does nothing for sacred mages
You invested in an F9 mage

Death pro:
AN damage
Disease (good against thugs/SCs and tough units like giants which you might not kill)
Afflictions can cripple tough units (seeing a chest wound pop up is my most favorite result of an attack ever)
+Afflictions works on sacred mages (ie, applies to their spells).
You invested in a D9 mage

Death con:
AN damage and disease are resistable

So, the extra damage is most useful against regular line troops, which are unlikely to resist the death damage anyway. In my mind, this makes the 6AP unresistable vs. 2AN + disease resistable comparison a wash.

Then ability to apply the +afflictions chance (and its a rather large one) to sacred caster spells is amazing (and many nations have sacred casters - recruitable, summonable, or both). This means the death bless remains effective into the late game, while the entire fire bonus becomes increasingly less useful.

Then once you consider that a D9 caster is arbitrarily better than an F9 caster, I can't see ever going for an F9 bless unless you have absolutely no sacred mages (or the D9 bless is prohibitively more expensive for your available chasses).

Is there something i'm missing here?