That's fair. There are actually guidelines on advancement (an entire chapter in Characters, and a very specific half-page in the Campaigns in the game-mastering section on guiding character advancement) but to be perfectly honest, no one ever reads those parts, they just grab the rules and...
I don't think this is the case. Fairly obviously, if handing out too much CP results in characters more powerful than is typical in D&D, and handing out too little results in characters that are weaker than is typical in D&D, there must be a happy medium somewhere in between that maps fairly...