LogFAQs > #970740060

Generally speaking the amount of time, effort, and feeling you put into the ability is also a major factor. This means that if you don't have an ability that is a bit special in this regard you can potentially make a large number of abilities but because you are spreading yourself thin you will end up weakening your average ability every time you add in a new one. Thus if you tried to do a "Well now I have the ability to just instantly kill you!" your emotions might be there but you definitely do not have it somewhat ingrained into you in the same sort of way that someone who had spent significant time on having a power that did just that would have and thus the ability would almost assuredly fail. This also happens on the Nen level where you are stretching your Nen out to the point that the average skill might suffer sheerly because of just throwing on a new ability. This is why most characters will take a basic ability and then try and figure out a way to make it specifically be the gas behind everything as one 100% powered ability is stronger than two 50% powered ones. Specialties are, really, a bit more of a hand wave in most respects as they are more of a personality test than anything else. While they are obviously not played as such there is no character that I'm aware of that doesn't follow an archetype that would be considered average for their specialty, so it really does boil down to a "life lessons" bit.

And Chrollo is basically the person you are thinking of as far as the whole "million abilities" thing, but taken into the context of the universe in question. As he steals abilities he essentially has an overwhelming number compared to everyone else, and he gets around the restrictions by having effectively one actual ability: stealing other people's abilities. Kurapika is the other major character in terms of having notably more than the average abilities (and not just off-shoots from the same ability) but he largely gets around it by having both a bit of a special bloodline as well as amping his resolve by having his relevant abilities literally killing him if he uses them against a non-Spider individual. In that vein it really wouldn't make sense for someone to be able to really replicate this in the way that you are talking about as Kurapika has almost his entire character motivation based around his hatred for the spiders so where he can leverage that fervor into more abilities without losing power, the average person is not really going to have such an emotional attachment to everything to the point that they could get such a violent reaction every time that they could ever make a specialized ability.