Here's the thing.
Stop pretending magic is rare or scary. As the game is played today, it's not. Balance the game with that concept in mind, and allow elementalists more avenues of interaction with the rest of the playerbase. Gemmies should be able to join the Byn or get hired by noble houses beyond just the Oash, but they shouldn't overshadow a combat speced mundane in the Arena, or a sneaky speced mundane in the Rinth.. This can be done.
For example, Whirans shouldn't be invincible death machines that can attack you regardless of your location, explore risk-free, and only suffer consequences if they make a human error. Instead, they should be able to float a little bit for a short duration, yank *willing* subjects to their location, turn perfectly invisible for *short* duration. Not better than mundanes -- but different. Situationally super useful, without overshadowing mundane abilities.
Then there can be flavors of magic (or whatever) that can actually be rare, powerful, and scary. To be rare, they should actually be rare...1 out every 25 or 50 PCs should be super special. It should be a rollcall that gets passed around different players, instead of, say, a handful of players making an endless string of karma 3 characters.