It's a holdover from Dungeons and Dragons and other table-top RPGs.
In these games, hybrid classes like Ranger, Paladin, fighter-Thief, and others, were often at each level nearly as powerful as either class that made up their class.
For example, A ranger was nearly always as powerful in melee as a fighter of the same level (similar hit dice and THAC0), but rangers could also cast druid spells. In this way, a level 4 ranger and a level 4 warrior were not equally strong.
Since D&D was typically played in static groups, with each character receiving roughly the same amount of experience per play session, forcing a hybrid class to get more experience in order to level was a way of balancing the power of a group.
Thus, after 3-4 sessions, your fighter might be level 4-5, but your ranger would only be level 3.
This worked in D&D because the vast majority of campaigns never had any character past level 10 or so. Achieving max level was less important in D&D because the DM could easily tailor encounters to the abilities of the party.
This doesn't work in Everquest for many reasons.
First of all, hybrids are not significantly more powerful than each of their parent classes at each level. They typically don't even fill the same roles as their parent classes. Shadow knights are not mana batteries, Paladins are not healers, Rangers are not buffers or tanks, Bards are worthless in physical combat compared to any other melee class.
Second, there is a level cap, and a substantial number of players actually reach it. Therefore the ability of players of parent classes to make up for any power deficit (that doesn't exist, see point 1) by simply getting another level or two, is not available.
Third, and possibly the biggest problem, was that no one really knew how much experience each person had. There was a recommendation early on from the EQ dev team that players group with other players who had similar amounts of raw experience, rather than looking at the level of the player. They wanted a level 30 cleric to be grouped with a level 24 or so paladin. The problem is, a level 30 warrior and a level 30 cleric can handle MUCH more powerful encounters than the 30/24 makeup, and in both situations the cleric would receive the same experience per kill. Since players preferred to group wither other players around their own character level rather than experience level, this revealed the error in the experience accrual system that came to be known as the "hyrbid experience penalty" where inviting a hybrid or, god forbid, two to your group would effectively halt experience when compared to a similar non-hybrid group.
In short. The original EQ developers used D&D as a template and blindly adopted many of D&D's systems without actually thinking deeply about how EQ would actually be played. Looking back, it was stupid and obvious that it wouldn't work the way they wanted it to. But you have to remember that EQ didn't have anything else to work off of, it was the first MMO of its kind. The only other big one at the time was Ultima Online, but that was a skills-based system rather than an experience based system.
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