You do realize there is experience gained for retrieving a cabal item, taking someone else's cabal item, exploring, completing quests, and notable RP? I'm going to assume you do. Experience for being inducted would seem to be right in line with these recent changes, in my humble opinion. The same advantages you point out as reasons against this being possible don't hold constant for these other experience gaining situtations.

"Unique powers:" That is exactly what you're getting when you retrieve your own cabal item. According to your logic, these would be reward enough and no reason for getting experience, yet this was recently changed to give experience.

"Access to better gear:" This is an advantage of exploring and quests as well, yet both can earn the player experience.

"Better coordination with allies, better opportunities to gain ranks:" It seems to me that these new experience bonuses that the Imms have been implementing have little to do with the opportunity to gain levels, and more to do with rewarding people in ways other than kill-repop-kill-repop that is fitting with the roleplay and encourages people in certain directions. Do you not agree?

I think they are great ideas. I'd love to see experience gained for getting into a cabal. I'd also like to see some of the experience bonuses bumped up. If you can get 4000 experience for figuring out the puzzles to a quest, it seems that you should get at least that much for notable roleplaying. Then again, I'm completely in favor of overhauling the kill-repop-kill-repop system for gaining experience. It seems to be one of the bigger burdens to roleplaying. Maybe the Imms should change how long it takes for an area to repop and give more experience for each kill. Maybe make it so it repops as though someone is in the area all the time, yet triple the experience given for each kill. So people run through killing all the arial prisoners, then they have to look around for somewhere else to go. Or something like that. Make it more like a RP adventure and less like lifeless repetition.

Hutto, the sleepy nitpicker