The real problem isn't the followers, but the cohort. And even that problem can be largely reduced by keeping the cohort as an NPC (i.e. controlled by the DM, not the player whose character he's a cohort of, even if he usually listens to that character.)
Before you meddle with that feature, you should understand why it's that way; it's designed that way because adding to a high ability score is generally more useful than adding to a low ability score, since you're going to try to use the features and classes that make use of your high scores. Effectively, "paying more the higher your attribute goes" is an anti-SAD feature, and as we see, it still isn't enough, so if you get rid of it you're going to either have to make all classes extremely heavily MAD, or else accept that people will have a mix of the highest and lowest possible with nothing in between (which I think will make the game a lot less interesting.)but paying more the higher your attribute goes always irked me
You might still want to give the DM a guideline as to what would happen if they had played up from level 1 with random treasure rolls, though. (And when you get down to it, that guideline is all that WBL really is; the only change would be making it clear that it's a guide for the DM and not a hard rule.)
On the flip side, it makes it a lot harder for the DM to balance correctly; make sure to keep that in mind when deciding whether to do it.The idea of getting rid of WBL was to prevent a certain amount of item rocket tag and the requirement of gear to overcome challenges (I'm looking at you DDO). Magic items still exist but the frequency and value of them are now completely up to the DM. This enables both high end low magic campaigns with a roughly equal amount of effort in this aspect.