That thought (that buffing alchemist is often the best choice) had crossed my mind previously, though it's not 100% clear-cut: giving the buff to the Alchemist can effectively double it, but at the cost of taking up a slot (a major cost) and preventing use of "right ally"/"left ally" effects (a more minor, situational cost.
Prioritising interesting decision-making is definitely a good thing - I guess in this case it comes at a cost of making alchemist much less likely to make it into play in the late game, since the effect isn't worth the cost, but that's probably not a big deal.
I think my reaction was mainly that some numbers are yellow while others aren't, and it's not immediately clear why, but I guess that was already the case? - eg. on cards which had multiple numeric effects, only one of which was buffable.
One approach might be to use words - eg. "one (power symbol)" instead of "1 (power symbol)" in the same way that some cards say "x2" (buffable) vs others saying "twice". But maybe that's just unnecessary fiddliness.