It definitely influences the tone. If you have a D4 for an ability, it's unusable until you can get an improvement. An interesting thing to work around when "No but" would've been safer/more like other games in the genre. I warmed up to the all-or-nothing approach, haven't decided to change it -- of course we can just go easy on the "and" if we feel it's too punitive.
Completely unrelated, but while I'm commenting: It looks like there's a typo in the physical edition, regarding "resource slot" and "asset slot" being separate terms that are the same thing.