My scrub alt (60 paladin):
https://wiki.project1999.com/Magelo_Blue:Mithromir
Not great, but when I played actively my efforts (and dkp) were squarely focused on my warrior. I do wish I had spent some of my banked dkp on a Narandi helm for him before I stepped away from active play and Azure Guard disbanded.
I can’t honestly remember what I put his starting points into. Half elf paladins have a starting strength of 80. What I do know is that, geared as he is, I can hit the strength cap with any combination of 2 of the following 3 buffs:
Maniacal strength
Focus
Big Yaulp
With any buff less than focus/maniacal, I won’t hit that cap. I can Yaulp myself up over 200 self buffed. Having max strength increases your attack as well as the other damage scaling perks of strength up to the cap.
The OP, unless they become a dedicated raider, will likely be looking at a magelo profile similar to mine (minus the weapon) as the glass ceiling. He won’t be capping stamina ever. He might get lucky to cap his strength with str/focus stack from a 60 shaman - and always be floating lower than that without. Unless he raids and raids hard, the OP has no risk of overcapping his strength buffed in groups.
Strength does provide fairly linear gains up to the cap.
Extra mana is always cool but most knights will spend 99.9% of their active playtime hovering at some percentage of mana below 100% - teetering up and down depending on innate mana regen (FT items and buffs) and however much time they can manage to pop a squat to get in a few med ticks before the next engage. Even soloing, never really meditate all the way up to 100%. Even with my pathetic mana pool it just isn’t necessary.