Its hard to empathize with someone you just met.  Empathy should take time as a social skill, Rapport is for any length of conversation.  Declarations will also make a huge difference.   If I'm talking to Marcone and try to empathize with him, my GM could tag his high concept of generally being a hard guy to make it more difficult.  However if I'm talking to Molly as an apprentice, I could tag her high concept to give me an edge with my empathy skill.  And as a smart rebellious teenager, rapport would probably be less effective,  again through aspect tags.

Doc- you're not really getting it.  I'm not talking about narrative effects, but MECHANICAL.  Your hydromancer could use water to apply a "soaked" aspect that you tag for a penalty to movement speed, while my biomancer does the same thing with "tremors" or "grasping plants". 

Gruff- please continue to argue with ad hominems and personally insult me.  When you get banned, maybe the rest of us can have a rational discussion.

Korwin - Earth is at least as versatile as spirit.   Electromagnetic waves, gravity and the earth...

Plus its against implied rules.  Only wizards can spend more than two refresh on specializations.  See the sorcerer template.

True.   But then its more the wizards will imitating a laser.  A wizard would have to have control of em fields to produce a real laser.

A laser would be earth evocation.  Lucio just casts a concentrated fuerzar

I don't see a problem as such with power limitations (or catches) as long as they are limitations. It is a fairly common approach to most points based RPGs.

For example the full shapechange ability cost -4 and the single change form costs -1. Someone wants any natural non-extinct animal and disguise (human form) that is probably worth -3 or -4 with a +1 limitation.

Human form is +1 and affects all supernatural powers.  It kind of refutes your whole argument. 

I really disagree.  Under that vein all wizards should get +2 towards evocation.  Those antimagic chains are hard to come by but everyone knows they cancel wizard powers.

Being elementally diverse doesn't do much within dfrpg as written.   If you want it to you'll have to house rule it.  Simple as that.  Were I to try, I'd start WoT style: fire and earth easier to generate power, water and air easier to control.  Spirit wouldn't get a bonus, being the most versatile.  Then I'd add effect shifts when elements are used outside their norm.   So Harry 's lake trick might cost him 8 shifts of power or control and Carlos, who'd use water, 5 or 6

I should add.  The latter can be done by a clever GM or PC and scene aspects