I'd like to see a screen cap of that. I'm fairly low-tier and I still swam in upgrade points around the mid point of the game on Nephilim. The only way I can conceive of you having a deficit would be if you spammed the same combos over and over. Be honest, were you Ophion Juggle Spamming with Rebellion through the whole game DR? You can admit it, this is a place of healing.
Untrue, you pay one white soul per upgrade on every upgrade. If an upgrade has multiple tiers you spend one point per tier. It takes two souls to unlock Demon Dodge I believe, although I could stand corrected.
...you were tapping DT just so as you performed every single punching weapon attack until you found the unique one with the glitch, all within a few days of unlocking those attacks? I'll go so far as to say that's statistically unlikely for most players. What's more, it's still a coding flaw rather than an intentional feature, and an intentional feature which breaks the game is inherently worse game design as well as cheapening to the experience as a whole.
Say you're playing Doom and you find the BFG9000 in the first room with enough ammo to take you through every level. You might say: "Huh, that's really bad game design." Then I chime in and say, "Well, you don't have to use it, do you! Look, it doesn't effect the amount of secrets you find in each level at all! And anyway, you can find a BFG in the secret room in the tenth level! And anyway, if you want one you can just cheat!"
You'd think I was completely missing the point, wouldn't you?
Consider another videogame series: Castlevania. Classic Castlevania is a legacy regarded to have started in 1986 and spans 14 games. They are regarded as cult classics thanks in no small part to their uncompromising difficulty. In '97 Symphony of the Night was released, a game which many old hands claimed was far too easy and failed to deliver an experience on par with it's predecessors because of it. In hindsight SotN is seen as a necessary evolution of the series.
The crucial difference between SotN and DmC is...well, a lot of things actually, but most importantly while SotN presented a far less brutal challenge compared to it's predecessors, it also added a significant amount of content. While the series prior was a simple sidescroller where you fought a straight line into the castle of Dracula, SotN took Metroid's example and opened up the game as a full scale exploration of the fortress. There was exploration to be had on every floor, secrets to be sought, all new abilities to discover for the protagonist and a plethora of items to find and use.
DmC on the other hand dumbs-down to and condescends to player on every conceivable level of it's presentation without offering any new gameplay nuances. The exploration is significantly toned down; while old Devil May Cry often had the player explore a large consistent environment, DmC often locks away areas you have already explored from backtracking, forcing you to replay the entire level just to check on what might have been a tucked away secret. Secret Missions are no longer Secret Missions you activate by interacting with suspicious level design elements; they're signposted and indicated by huge glowing keys and massive doorways you couldn't possibly miss. Hey though, at least we got platforming so easy it plays itself, right?
We have lost so much and gained barely anything.