^ Well, how do you define the early game, exactly? The elf is only stronger than the gnome early game if you find and convert enough stuff to hit thresholds, but that's rather map dependent. In my mind, if a strat requires acess to everything there is on the floor (overexploring) or finding all the shops, that can't be the baseline way because it requires either glyph luck or prepping just to deal with the map. I'm not sure what was "meant to be", but I do know that whenever overexploring early on became vogue spellcasters ran rampant because you could play them the way you seem to think is the default way to play them, and even the map generating algorthym (or whatever) had been tweaked at least once for that. Used to be a time that was the only thing even considered a degenerate strat and every time a Gnome could burn the place down at lvl1 that only meant they still weren't where they were meant to be. (Took a lot of nerfing Binlor to stop us from approaching every map like you're supposed to have a Titan's Guitar on every run, not necessarily related to gnomes, but yes to overexploring
)
It always worked, but I'm not sure it was ever really meant to be the default way of looking at things. You're thinking in terms of "what lets me do more damage on the boss" or "what lets me win". If you want to win, you can just prep yendor or pissorff or Orcs on stuff or whatever. You can win easily by figuring out what lets you bypass whatever the challenge is and win. You can win with many less extreme builds, in fact, so many that to a vet the map doesn't pose the question of "How do I win", but "Let's see how many different ways to win has the RNG spawned for me, which of these might possibly be coded to be more likely to appear with this race/class combo, and which of them do I feel like winning with now". Even on the Labyrinth. In fact - I've lately come to appreciate it simply because if you don't prep no-clip hacks it actually plays more sensibly than most other maps in terms of what I recall the Devs mentioning about how various racess and classess were supposed to work.
What I meant by you not necessarily getting the gnome and the elves straight is the whole "which one makes a better hybrid and which one makes a better pure spellcaster". If there's no walls, and if you pick stuff that allows it, and you convert everything etc, you can play them like that. But if you build up the gnome and spend gold and boons on it, and you try to hold off as many potions for the boss because the plan is to pelt the boss with magic - then you're not playing him as a hybrid, you're playing him as a spellcaster. The Elf doesn't have to bother with that or focus spellcasting - he just becomes a capable spellcaster in addition to whatever else he is. That's why the Dwarf makes a good hybrid - you play whatever and end up still being a crazy melee guy right at the end even if your whole map was spent spellcasting your way to levels, but you feel the benefits slowly build up.
The Sorcerer's a great hybrid for the same reason the Elf is - you're a gamewinning spellcaster with 0 effort put into it. The "optimal" sorcerer race isn't the Gnome - because that's just abuse (and THAT is why gnomes aren't talked about much, and also why they don't have too many plugs - you give them a mana pool they just destroy everything without much gameplay required, they don't need anything else, but if you touch stuff they're sinergistic with you mess up everyone else's game). There's no NEED to play the sorcerer as a pure spellcaster even if it works, that's just reductive powergaming which missess the point of why he's there in the first place - to give a mana pool to melee guys. Dwarf Sorcerer of Binlor - that's a hybrid. Gnome Sorcerer of Mystera - that's basically a hack. Certainly if it's the best Sorcerer AND the best Gnome. Because you're hardly playing the Sorcerer, and you can get your Gnome buildup game solved for you by the PQI. Then whatever you pile onto that it's inevitably just overkill, because if you weren't the Sorcerer just about the entirety of your gameplay would consist of becoming one. What else does a Gnome need? Nothing, as you've discovered yourself. You hardly even need levels.
You can play a kick-ass hybrid elf anywhere, and hybrids naturally love dings because they can use both the health and mana, but playing him as a pure spellcaster takes either overexploring or is overkill or it means that you've basically bypassed a lot of stuff that was supposed to challenge you.
Not that it's my place to say or decide what's supposed to or not, I can only use my faulty brain to try to deduce it from what the devs did when we did what during the rather long beta. But Gnomes make impossible pure spellcasters, Halflings make incredible pure melee guys, while the Dwarfs and Elves make rather easy to play transitiony hybrids. The Devs kept telling us this about Elves and Dwarves, except some of us didn't understand because we were more prone to cheeze and misuse stuff (and well, because of the clogged lockers which kinda locks you into a perspective so once you discover something you tend to cheeze it as far as it goes, much like you're doing with Gnomes right now which is likely to land you into a rather Gnomeless PQI like it did me
).