You could say that they are more capable, they're just not necessarily stronger. The way I see it, we pay the exp penalty for the ability to be two things at once. Especially before Kunark, shadowknights and paladins weren't far behind warriors and the main distinction in terms of melee prowess was dual-wield. Disciplines kind of skewed this ideal, and they did indeed remove exp penalties in the third expansion after adding disciplines in the second. The pure melee classes are extremely simple and limited in what they can do, and it make some measure of sense to me that taking a melee class that's almost as good* as a pure melee and giving them dozens of mostly useful spells justifies a penalty. Shadowknights are fairly decent soloers and paladins are pretty good healers while rangers have a wheelbarrow full of useful tools. It looks like a design lapse that pure classes become so much better than hybrids in the very end, and for most of the leveling process, the hybrids are generally better classes to play.
*in theory at least, if not in practice. I'm sure the developers didn't intentionally design rangers to be pretty poor DPS or knights to be largely unable to tank raid mobs, but I suspect the development process kind of spiraled out of control, leading to hamfisted extremes like defensive discipline to make up for the lack of options warriors had.
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