User blog comment:Zolnir/Volume 2 Episode 4: Short Review, and Future Predictions/@comment-25091485-20140815083655/@comment-11188061-20140815110212

Uh, have you seen how much of an effot Team RWBY needed to put in in order to defeat the Paladin? One full team to take it down, and our MCs are probably one of the strongest first year fighters. Just imagine Team CDRL as they are at Volume 1 trying to fight it, they'll be evaporated in an instant.

Not to mention that the Paladin is man made, a machine. It can be mass produced with the right resources, and - assuming that they have similar machines in the past - anyone half competent at piloting (technically everyone but veterans who have fought and killed are half competent, btw) can use it. I believe that it can even operate automatically, although of course AIs are never the brightest things in the world.

The most important thing here is that the Paladin doesn't need to be trained for nearly as long as a Hunter. Obviously a Hunter is the strongest, and has the highest potential out of any existing combating being. However, just like our own system, it takes an obscenely long time to put them to use.

Imagine churning out Paladins in just three months, as compared to training a complete newbie into a half-competent Hunter in 3 years, and that's a best guess number. Can a graduated Signal student match the specs of a Paladin? No, they still need to go through Beacon and probably reach second year before they'll be able to fight a Paladin by themselves.

Point: Machines's peak are never going to rival a Hunter's, but it can be mass produced much faster and reliably (how many students drop out of the Academy every year? There had to be some, and those are lost investment), and anyone can pilot a machine whether they have their Auras unlocked or not.

The machine's advantage is especially obvious against an enemy like the Grimm, whose superior number since the beginning of time had never changed despite mankind rebuilding themselves into prosperity since god knows how many years. Mankind will never be able to train enough Hunters at a time to push back the Grimm, because Hunters consist of perhaps only 20% of the entire human population (even though all of them has the potential to be one). But machines, they can use 100% of their numbers to fight back. That is likely Atlas dream - to one day use machines to cover for their lack of manpower, and one day defeat and even overturn the number superiority the Grimm has for so long.