High intelligence helps your character against fiends, increases your learning rate and your mana per level, and as a warrior gives you an incentive to get Striking (see recent logs). From a roleplay perspective, it allows you to use complete sentences with polysyllabic words, allowing your character to legitimately publish some smooooove poetry to win the hearts of those sexy ladies with the pointed ears.

The benefit to practicing you mentioned is easily circumvented if you are patient, and so I see your suggestion as a non-proposal.

The questions I would ask are, "Immortal-coder-pk gods, do you train your intelligence to 25 when you play an elf?" and "What is your reasoning?"