Level Up Weapons Skills With Gold Or Gems

Please add a mechanic using a league currency, gold, or skills gems, to level up weapons SKILLS to current level (not the weapon itself, or its stats).

Weapons have always had a replace-or-fall-out-of-pace problem in Path Of Exile. In the first game, this isn't a huge problem because you can always just swap a weapon out for something with higher stats. For casters, this mattered even less outside of very late game mapping since the attacks on staffs (and sometimes wands) were rarely used, so only modifiers on the weapons ever mattered.

Path of Exile 2 ties specific spells to specific weapons. If I want to use lightning bolt, then I need to run a voltaic staff.

Unfortunately, skill damage grows roughly exponentially in POE 2, with many gems gaining ~50% more base damage every 2 levels (multiplicative from the stats 2 levels down).

These two qualities necessarily imply that weapon level is the most important stat for gear if you have any interest in its skill. If a weapon's skill is two levels or further behind your current gems, then it can't really be used to kill anything anymore. No other skills have this same problem. If I want to use a reaping staff, and have good stats on it like +level of physical spells, then my reap skill alone will fall out of favor other spells will be perfectly viable for many levels.

The mechanic more and more games add to address similar issues is to let players invest a currency to level up their gear. While I'd love the feature, there are some obvious implications to the game's economy that would likely prohibit it. The fix, however, is simple:

Add a feature to level up the skill, and only the skill, on a weapon to the current level. This way, the weapon's gem will behave exactly like all the other skills a player has. There would be no more "all my spells are great except this weapon skill" issue. Otherwise, there's no possible way to rely on a weapon's skill through all the leveling content in the game.