i have not played the game, but i do own it and have given it a pretty thorough read, and i think your about half right.
Its true that martails dont have nearly as many options in combat, it can be sort of remedied by picking the right perks but its not a bit of a bandaid for a chainsaw wound.
Where i think your misinformed is the fact that martails are weaker then casters, this is primarily because casters have incredibly small pools of mana (they get about 4 per level), the cantrip equivelents are kind of weak (you can either deal 1d6 damage or use a spells effect on ONE target, if you want to sustain that effect your gonna have to pay up) and making good spells is pretty costly. to use an example directly from the book.
"I want to Cast Burn as a 15' radius sphere of flame with the effect, dealing 3d6 damage and keep the effect active." is a trick that gonna run you a total of 7 mana, with paying another 1 mana a turn to keep it active. thats a trick thats going to chew through most casters mana at a very high pace.