Was the level up system improved with later ports?

[Peter1986]

hey now, steroid muscles are real muscles too.

Yes, and the HP you earn by abusing the leveling bug is real HP.
My point was that I feel that this HP isn't really "earned" in a natural way if I just abuse a bug for several minutes, but more like something that I might as well have programmed into the characters via a cheat code or something.

You don't risk anything or do any actual work when you abuse the leveling bug, because all you do is that you repetitively choose the exactly same commands over and over, and the enemies cannot even get turns while you are doing that.
Compare this to playing the game normally - this means that you actually take damage and plow through possibly dangerous battles, and become stronger that way.
And to me, this seems a lot more "real" and "honest".

But sure, there are some parts in the game where the leveling bug is tempting to use just because this game is so poorly balanced in some places;
for example, like I said in my last post, in the later dungeons like the Whirlwind and especially in Jade/Pandemonium you had better have the Heal spell on a reasonably high level, but you probably won't have enough realistic chances to use it often enough for that.