User blog comment:Zelron/The Thu'um (Waging War with Words)/@comment-2040576-20121104082315/@comment-4057437-20121105074519

Using Dragon souls as a kind of currency to buy perks in a shout tree would have been O.K. if Bethesda had included it from the start. As it is, most players with a high level character have a ton left over souls and could buy a bunch of perks immediately. (We both have characters with over 100 souls left after activating all the words in the game so far.)

If Bethesda tried to compensate for this by making the perks cost a lot of souls, it would make the perks unavailable for lower level characters.

There is no reason Bethesda couldn't add new skill trees, and therefore the level cap, instead. We would like an optional Hardcore mode, which could introduce a Survival skill tree. They could also add Unarmed or the Shout skill tree suggested by Zelron, but based on using shouts, just as with all the other skill trees, not souls. That way, low level characters could have equal access.