ROGUELIKE DESIGN: SHOULD I REMOVE LEVELING?

I'm gearing up to start implementing actual enemies in my game so I decided to give my battle mechanics another pass over. It dawned on me that I didn't actually need XP/leveling. With the way my game is designed currently, it's impossible to back-track or do any grinding. It's also pretty much impossible to end up overleveled/underleveled. Monster levels grow at roughly the same rate as the player do and there's no stealth/escape mechanic. Leveling currently only increase stats. It used to be more important for character progression when my game was a bit more open but since I've redesigned other mechanics the non-stat benefits leveling used to provide were either cut or rolled into different systems.

I've been brainstoriming advantages/disadvantages and this is what I've come up with so far:

Advantages:

• Smaller numbers. Right now in order to make leveling feel satisfying the power gained from leveling is exponential (roughly 11% - 5% boost each level). A max level character is roughly 10x more powerful than a level 1 character. Throw in gear and additional abilities and this easily can become 20x-30x stronger than a level 1 character. An end-game unique might end up with HP in the five to six digits range. If I cut leveling it becomes a much more manageable 2x-3x difference.
  
  
• Lower stats means early-game unique items with unique effects would be much easier to use in the end-game.
  
  
• Easier to fine-tune monsters since I don't need to worry about scaling.
  

Disadvantages:

• Characters become more gear dependent. Currently attributes are split roughly 50/50 between base stats and gear. Without leveling it might end up something more like 35/65. I would possibly have to add some sort of RNG protection.
  
  
• Possibly less enemy variety. With my current system I can scale up any monster to whatever level I want. While a max-level rat might not be too threatening due to their simple skillset, something like a difficult mid-game unique could pose a pretty big threat if scaled up to a max-level party. Monsters would have a level range so that simplistic enemies wouldn't be encountered late and complicated monsters wouldn't be found too early. Although without leveling the difference between mid-game and late-game wouldn't be as big either. This would take a lot of play-testing to figure out.

Any thoughts? Should I leave things as is, add more mechanics to leveling, or pull the trigger?