If you compare unarmed attacks on a monk to what you can do with end-game weapons the monk comes up severely lacking. Even worse is the fact that a ninja can do more damage unarmed without the 'Unarmed' skill, and have higher speed and move to boot. Also the 'Punch Art' skills scale very poorly at higher levels. Unarmed damage takes off exponentially as PA rises, but growth of the actual skills slows to a crawl.

It isn't a bad skill to compliment Malak's ability, but it is being used in a sub-optimal way in order to justify using Malak in the first place.