The new system needs a lot of work and tweaks, but anything is better then having to essentially lock in 3 INT companions, 1 AGI companion, and the rest STR companions. How you mixed your followers may differ (I personally went with more INT monkeys for the training), but there was no flexibility in how you leveled them, you just picked the one and only stat you were going to level on a char/companion and that was it. The old system did not allow for 'splitting' up stats (unless you were intent on leveling people well past 30). As broken as the new system currently may be, I struggle to find a reasonable argument for why the old system was 'better'.
New system needs a LOT of work to be sure, much balancing needed for rate/growth/viability of skills (I think the snowball factor exacerbates much of the problem, when the game is essentially 'over' in a year or two), but ultimately it won't take much to be an improvement over the lack of variability in warband.